In this project, Dr Przemyslaw Jarzebowski at University College London explores how predicting what sounds we expect to hear can impact on understanding speech in noisy environments.
Project start date: March 2025
project end date: June 2027
About the project
Age-related hearing loss makes comprehension of speech in noisy backgrounds more difficult. In these situations, our brain often relies on the predictions of what we will hear, based on lip movements and previous words in a sentence.
We still need to learn about how and where in the brain these predictions happen. This project will address this question and explore whether predictions improve the detection of sounds in the brain.
How it works
Prez will study auditory signals in the brains of ageing mice while the mice listen to repeating, and therefore predictable, sounds, creating an expectation about the sounds to come. By recording brain activity when the expected sounds are omitted, the researchers can gauge the strength of these auditory predictions.
Prez will then compare the brain’s activity in the presence and absence of background noise and test how it differs in age-related hearing loss. These comparisons will tell us whether stronger auditory predictions that compensate for the noise could also be how the brain compensates for the degraded sound information it receives in age-related hearing loss.
How will this research benefit people at risk of age-related hearing loss?
This study will help uncover how and where in the brain our predictions about upcoming sounds are integrated with actual sound information to support hearing. As a result, we will better understand the interaction between the brain signals generated by sounds and those generated internally by predictions, and how their respective role and interactions change in people with age-related hearing loss.
About the researcher
Dr Przemyslaw Jarzebowski is a Research Fellow at University College London. He was awarded an RNID Fellowship Grant for this project, co-funded by the Vivensa Foundation.
I hope my research will shed light on how brain signals generated by sounds interact with those generated internally, for example, by predictions about upcoming sounds. This process is crucial for normal hearing but likely even more so when the processing of sounds is affected by age-related hearing loss.”
