Neuroscientist Jonathan Peelle, PhD, was awarded a one-year $479,000 grant from the National Institute on Aging to look at the influence of reward and motivation in speech processing. The project, called, “Age-related changes in language processing,” will study whether offering listeners explicit rewards result in greater speech intelligibility among older adults. The study is a […]
Diseases associated with motor control and balance represent the most common neurological disorders affecting the world today. To help fight this trend, Pablo Blazquez, PhD, and Tatyana Yakusheva, PhD, study the role of the cerebellum in motor control, balance and spatial navigation. They use a diverse array of experimental techniques, including measures of individual neuron […]
Washington University undergraduate Heather Chung works with Mark Rutherford, PhD, to test synapse loss. The Rutherford lab studies the smallest parts of the ear called synapses. Synapses are the sites of communication between two neurons or between a neuron and a sensory receptor cell. New biological imaging techniques have made these structures much easier to […]
Hair cells are the exquisitely sensitive and inexhaustible sensory receptors of the auditory and vestibular systems. They function by transducing mechanical stimuli, such as sound, into nerve impulses that transmit sensory information to the brain. Features of hair cells that make them incredibly effective detectors of sound also make them vulnerable to damage from noise […]
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have received $10.5 million from the Department of the Army to investigate whether an anti-seizure drug can prevent noise-induced hearing loss when given several hours before exposure to extremely loud noise. Read more
If you wake up one morning with sudden deafness, experience dizziness as a result of Meniere’s disease, or if you have cochlear implant surgery, your doctor may choose to treat your ear with a locally applied drug. One limitation of this new approach is that most of the drugs in use have been repurposed from […]
The Tye-Murray laboratory studies hearing loss and speech recognition. Half of the lab’s projects center upon understanding the fundamental processes that allow for successful lipreading because being able to read lips greatly enhances a patient’s ability to engage successfully in conversation. The second half centers upon developing rehabilitation strategies that develop listening abilities in both […]
Over the last two decades, there has been a rapidly rising proportion of cancers of the throat linked to human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. Cancers of the throat, or oropharyngeal cancer, caused by HPV have increased by an alarming 225% over the last 20 years. Why smokers’ outcomes […]
Although our ears are important for hearing, it is our brain that makes sense of what we hear. How our brains process speech is a central theme in the research of Jonathan Peelle, PhD. In research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Peelle Lab uses behavioral testing and brain imaging to study […]