Senior Scientist
Boys Town National Research Hospital

Adjoint Associate Professor
Hearing and Speech Sciences
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Founder and Chief Scientist
Auditory Space, LLC

cstecker
@spatialhearing.org

Spatial Hearing Lab, aka the SPACE lab

Spatial Perception in Acoustically Complex Environments

Stimulus-Parametric imaging of Auditory CortEx

G. Christopher Stecker, Director

How do we use sound to make sense of the complex and ever-changing world around us? What are the neural mechanisms that allow us to localize, tell apart, and understand multiple sound sources in the presence of echoes, reverberation, and competing sounds?

We use two kinds of methods to address these questions. Behavioral experiments allow us to study how listeners perceive auditory space and the particular kinds of acoustic information they use to do so. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows us to map the brain regions involved in processing that information.

As our maps of the auditory brain become more detailed, we hope to combine these approaches ever more closely to better understand the specific brain events underlying spatial perception in acoustically complex environments.