In this project, Dr Emma Holmes at University College London investigates how the brain, rather than the ear, is involved with understanding speech in noisy places, and whether brain training can help improve listening in these environments.
Project start date: January 2020
Project end date: November 2023
Read about project outcomes here.
About the project
Many people with hearing loss struggle to listen in noisy places, even with hearing aids, which may cause them to avoid social situations.
Our brains play an important role in interpreting what we hear, and so hearing loss may also affect how the brain processes sounds. It could be that problems with processing sounds in the brain may underlie why people with hearing loss find noisy places particularly difficult.
In this project, Emma will establish how processes in the brain help people to understand speech in noisy places, and measure how these processes are affected by hearing loss.
How it works
One way in which people try to improve their listening in noisy places is to anticipate ‘where to listen’ – for example, we often predict who will speak next by looking around us. This helps us to better understand speech in these situations, and it is accompanied by measurable changes in brain activity.
Emma will simulate real-life scenarios in a hearing lab, using a speech-in-noise task that gives clues to help participants to anticipate ‘where to listen’ (to the left or to the right). She has already shown that this test can detect differences in attention between children with normal hearing and children with hearing loss.
The project combines:
- behavioural experiments (listening performance)
- brain imaging to measure neural activity
- computational modelling to simulate ‘active listening’
Together, these approaches will help understand how the brain supports listening in noisy environments – and how hearing loss changes these processes.
What we’ve learned so far
This project has advanced our understanding of how hearing loss affects the brain, not just the ear. It showed that the ability to use spatial attention to focus on a target voice in noisy environments is reduced by age-related hearing loss, even though it remains intact in older adults with good hearing. The research also led to a new computational model of “active listening,” helping explain how the brain predicts and prioritises sounds.
Further findings show that hearing loss changes how the brain allocates cognitive resources: individuals with poorer hearing recruit additional brain regions and effort when preparing to listen, reflecting compensatory strategies. Together, these insights support the development of new clinical tests and hearing technologies designed to improve listening in noisy environments.
About the researcher
Dr Emma Holmes is an Associate Professor in Speech and Hearing Science at UCL and leads the Cognitive Hearing Lab. She was awarded an RNID Fellowship for this project in 2019.
During my PhD, I had the chance to meet lots of children who used hearing aids, and I learned that hearing aids were not well equipped to deal with background noise. This motivated me to conduct research that could help to develop future technologies for improving hearing in everyday noisy environments.
I want to make a real difference to people’s lives.”
