My research seeks quantitative models which “hear the world like a human”, that is, models which explain and predict human behavior in ecologically relevant listening tasks (i.e. scene analysis, localization, size and distance estimation, etc.). These models demonstrate the perceptual importance of specific stimulus features. Most of the stimulus features explicit in my models have not been investigated with neuroscience experiments and little is known about how and where they are encoded in the brain. I hope to use these models to generate novel stimuli that can uncover neural circuits fundamental to auditory perception. As my research focuses on basic perceptual tasks, my stimuli are ecologically relevant for many model organisms in neuroscience research (i.e. mice, rats, zebrafish, etc.). In the auditory domain in particular, where much human perceptual work has focused on speech and music, my research offers novel methods to investigate auditory processing across a wide range of species.

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