By listening to speech and measuring brain activity, we can investigate how different aspects of spoken language are encoded and processed by the brain. However, much less is known about whether eye movements and gaze behaviour also reflect how we listen to and understand speech in complex noisy environments. Recent research suggests that gaze may be linked to auditory attention and listening effort, even when there is no relevant visual information. In this project, you will simultaneously record EEG and eye-tracking data while participants listen to speech in complex auditory environments, where a target speaker is mixed with competing background speech or noise coming from different directions. The aim is to investigate whether patterns of gaze behaviour, such as gaze direction, gaze variability, fixation behaviour, pupil dilation, and saccadic eye movements, change depending on the difficulty of the listening condition and the success of speech understanding.
You will join an interdisciplinary research team composed of the principal investigator, three postdoctoral researchers, six PhD students, and two research assistants. The team meets weekly to discuss exciting ongoing work from within and outside the team, which is also an opportunity for Master’s students to experience research life and learn about the latest advances in brain and generative AI research (especially speech, language, and music processing).
Lab website: https://diliberg.net