Emily Buss, PhD

Emily Buss, PhD, is an auditory science researcher involved in a range of projects investigating the perception of sound in human listeners. Many of these projects focus on special populations, including hearing-impaired adults, children with chronic otitis media, and cochlear implant users. Other projects focus on normal-hearing adults and children, with the goal of developing normative models of auditory processing and development. Experimental methods used in these studies include traditional psychophysical paradigms based on behavioral responses, such as detection or discrimination, as well as objective measures, such as surface-recorded evoked potentials and acoustic reflex. In many cases the resulting data can be incorporated into a computer-based model that formally characterizes different stages of auditory processing.

Dr. Buss is currently working on research initiatives aimed at understanding the effect of OME on the utilization of speech cues in masking noise, central neural plasticity in response to peripheral hearing loss, the importance of temporal cues in speech understanding, and the role of amplitude modulation across frequency in parsing a sound scene. In the past year work has begun on the use of internal noise to model the development of auditory processing in school-aged children.

In addition to this laboratory work, Dr. Buss maintains an ongoing involvement in a number of cochlear implant investigations, for which she provides support in experimental design and analysis. She is also involved in a multidisciplinary study with UNC’s Department of Psychology using fMRI to characterize the cortical representation of sound in patients with normal hearing and with hearing loss.