Project Grant R01DC023975

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders awarded Oregon Health & Science University $645,488 on July 27, 2026, under the Research Related to Deafness and Communication Disorders program (CFDA 93.173) to characterize how the auditory cortex processes speech and natural sounds in noisy, dynamic acoustic environments.

The research addresses the clinical problem that listeners with hearing loss struggle to understand speech in complex noise despite hearing aids and other prostheses. The project will characterize neural activity in auditory cortex during free-moving behavioral detection tasks where subjects track one of two concurrent natural sounds while neural decoding methods reveal how subpopulations of neurons across hierarchically organized auditory fields selectively represent target sounds. A second component builds computational models of how neurons encode complex natural sounds to determine the underlying computations supporting natural sound streaming. A third component characterizes neural and behavioral mechanisms for tracking and grouping concurrent acoustic sources. The research will manipulate statistical properties of continuous background noise to reveal how the auditory system accommodates changing background sound conditions.

The award is structured as a project grant, which is the largest funding category within the NIDCD research portfolio. Work is performed in Portland, Oregon. The period of performance runs through June 30, 2031.