“The Impact of Age and Experience on Auditory Learning"
Beverly Wright and Dan Sanes
Event Description
A remarkable feature of human sensory perception is that it can be improved with practice. In fact, practice can give rise to perceptual improvements that leverage our most profound skills, such as aural language and musical ability. While it is often assumed that children are the best learners, laboratory research shows that the capacity to learn with practice improves well into adolescence. In other words, when given exactly the same training experience, children learn less than adults. Moreover, while it is thought that the capacity to learn declines during aging, older adults whose auditory perception is impaired can recover those skills with a brief period of practice. The behavioral changes during learning appear to arise from changes within auditory cortex. For example, in adult animals, the responses of individual cortex neurons improve in lockstep with behavioral improvement during practice. Furthermore, in adolescent animals, learning is reduced - just as in humans - and this reduction is mirrored by poorer cortical neuron responses. Taken together, these observations suggest that training has the potential to aid perceptual performance throughout life, so long as the training is tailored to one’s age.
Dr. Beverly Wright, is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University, and serves as Director of the Hugh Knowles Center for Clinical and Basic Science in Hearing and Its Disorders. She earned her doctorate in Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Florida and the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Wright’s research laboratory explores the general principles of auditory learning in humans, a process that supports both speech comprehension and musical abilities. Her research also focusses on how learning depends on age, sensory experience (hearing loss), and cognitive background (e.g., language and reading disorders). Research on perceptual learning may lead to more effective training strategies for enhancing normal perceptual capacities and treating perceptual disorders.
Dr. Dan Sanes is a Professor in the Center for Neural Science at New York University. He earned a doctorate in Biology from Princeton, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and the University of Virginia. His lab explores how early auditory experiences, including both learning and hearing loss, influence the development of cortical function. Dr. Sanes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, co-authors the undergraduate textbook “Development of the Nervous System,” and serves as a Senior Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience. His research is funded by the NIH.
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