Systems Neuroscience of Auditory Perception Lab (SNAPlab)
Welcome to SNAPlab's home on the web! SNAPlab is based in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh with affiliations at the Pittsburgh Hearing Research Center and the Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences at Purdue University. We are a multidisciplinary team integrating expertise and perspectives from neuroscience, engineering, audiology, and psychology to study the neural circuits and biological computations underlying our sense of hearing. In particular, we investigate how our ears and brains encode and interpret complex sounds—like speech—in noisy, real-world settings like crowded restaurants and bustling streets. A central focus is understanding suprathreshold hearing difficulties, where individuals can detect/hear the sounds but struggle to clearly extract meaningful information from them.
Traditionally, hearing problems are assessed and treated based on one's ability to detect soft sounds (i.e., audibility). While reduced audibility is the defining and well-understood feature of hearing loss, much less is known about the biological mechanisms underlying suprathreshold hearing problems, which invariably co-occur. Suprathreshold challenges persist even with modern hearing aids, which restore audibility but often fail to restore speech clarity or allow listeners to effectively filter background noise. Furthermore, suprathreshold issues affect not only individuals with measurable hearing loss but also many with clinically normal hearing, including older adults, children with autism, those with a history of concussive injuries (e.g., veterans, athletes), and individuals exposed to occupational noise—such as workers in the storied steel mills, mines, and farms across our region. Because each person's suprathreshold difficulties likely arise from a unique pattern of injury to inner-ear structures and/or changes in brain circuitry, individuals with the same clinical hearing status can differ markedly in their hearing outcomes. Alarmingly, these hearing difficulties affect over 20% of Americans over the age of 12, contributing to social isolation, impaired communication, reduced quality of life, and nearly a trillion dollars in global economic costs every single year. Our lab employs psychoacoustics, non-invasive physiological measures, and computational modeling to investigate how human suprathreshold hearing succeeds or breaks down. We also collaborate extensively with researchers using animal models to explore fundamental neural mechanisms, and with clinicians to advance precision diagnostics, guide personalized treatments, and enhance assistive technologies such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and brain-machine interfaces. Our work has been generously supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) of the Department of Defense, and the Hearing Health Foundation.