Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

  • Professor, Center of Neural Basis of Cognition, Biomedical Engineering, Psychology, and Electrical & Computer Engineering
  • Director, Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute

Current Research

How do we make sense of speech and other sounds, given the cacophony reaching our ears in ordinary social settings? What brain networks allow us to focus attention and suppress uninteresting sound? Can we develop new assistive communication devices and technologies that leverage knowledge from auditory neuroscience to aid listeners with hearing impairment or other communication disorders? Dr. Shinn-Cunningham's research uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to understand auditory processing, from how sound is encoded in the inner ear to how cognitive networks modulate the representation of auditory information in the brain.

 

Selected Current Publications


Abur D, Lupiani AA, Hickox AE, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Stepp CE. Loudness Perception of Pure Tones in Parkinson's Disease. J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2018 Jun 19;61(6):1487-1496. doi: 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-H-17-0382.

Dai L, Best V, Shinn-Cunningham BG. Sensorineural hearing loss degrades behavioral and physiological measures of human spatial selective auditory attention. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Apr 3;115(14):E3286-E3295. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1721226115. Epub 2018 Mar 19.

Tóth B, Kocsis Z, Háden GP, Szerafin Á, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Winkler I. Corrigendum to "EEG signatures accompanying auditory figure-ground segregation" [NeuroImage (2017) volume 141, pp. 108-119]. Neuroimage. 2018 May 15;172:915. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.001. Epub 2017 Dec 9.

Noyce AL, Cestero N, Michalka SW, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Somers DC. Sensory-Biased and Multiple-Demand Processing in Human Lateral Frontal Cortex. J Neurosci. 2017 Sep 6;37(36):8755-8766. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0660-17.2017. Epub 2017 Aug 8.

Haghighi M, Moghadamfalahi M, Akcakaya M, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Erdogmus D. A Graphical Model for Online Auditory Scene Modulation Using EEG Evidence for Attention. IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2017 Nov;25(11):1970-1977. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2017.2712419. Epub 2017 Jun 6.

Varghese L, Mathias SR, Bensussen S, Chou K, Goldberg HR, Sun Y, Sekuler R, Shinn-Cunningham BG. Bi-directional audiovisual influences on temporal modulation discrimination. J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 Apr;141(4):2474. doi: 10.1121/1.4979470.

Mehraei G, Gallardo AP, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Dau T. Auditory brainstem response latency in forward masking, a marker of sensory deficits in listeners with normal hearing thresholds. Hear Res. 2017 Mar;346:34-44. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2017.01.016. Epub 2017 Feb 1.

Lim Y, Lagoy R, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Gardner TJ. Transformation of temporal sequences in the zebra finch auditory system. Elife. 2016 Nov 29;5. pii: e18205. doi: 10.7554/eLife.18205.

Dai L, Shinn-Cunningham BG. Contributions of Sensory Coding and Attentional Control to Individual Differences in Performance in Spatial Auditory Selective Attention Tasks. Front Hum Neurosci. 2016 Oct 20;10:530. eCollection 2016.

Tóth B, Kocsis Z, Háden GP, Szerafin Á, Shinn-Cunningham BG, Winkler I. EEG signatures accompanying auditory figure-ground segregation. Neuroimage. 2016 Nov 1;141:108-119. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.07.028. Epub 2016 Jul 12. Erratum in: Neuroimage. 2017 Dec 9.