I had two postdoctoral fellowships, first at the University of Rochester with Professor Christopher Holt and then at the University of Illinois at Chicago with Professors Jonathan Art and Jay Goldberg. I began studying the vestibular system during my dissertation research at the Università di Pavia with Professors Ivo Prigioni and GianCarlo Russo. Together, these presentations are designed to provide a broad and interdisciplinary view of the impact of sensory restoration in hearing, vision and balance, and the potential for future approaches for improving the lives of patients. Rob Shepherd’s discussion of current work and future possibilities involving biological treatments and neural prostheses. Matthew Winn will talk about cognitive load and listening effort using pupillometry, and we will end with Dr. Sharon Cushing will discuss her work as a clinician on 3-D auditory and vestibular effects. René H Gifford will discuss recent work on electric-acoustic integration in children and adults, and Dr. Having set the stage for thinking about the role of vision in a multisensory auditory world, we will hear from experts in the area of cochlear implants.
Jennifer Groh’s work will then discuss multi-sensory processing and how it is that vision helps us hear.
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are new to the ARO community, and will discuss neurobiology of the visual system as it relates to visual prostheses. Here we integrate psychophysics, clinical research, and biological approaches, aiming to gain a coherent understanding of how we might ultimately improve outcomes in patients. The symposium then highlights the work of scientists working across these areas. Jeffrey Holt, who studies gene therapy strategies for hearing restoration. We start with Rebecca Alexander, a compelling public speaker who has been living with Usher’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder found in tens of thousands of people, causing both deafness and blindness in humans. Vision is known to impact auditory perception and neural mechanisms in vision and audition are tightly coupled, thus, in order to understand how we hear and how CIs affect auditory perception we must consider the integrative effects across these senses. Notably, the visual system is tightly couples to the auditory system. Importantly, auditory abilities operate in the context of how hearing integrates with other senses.
However, there is also typically a notable gap in outcomes relative to normal-hearing listeners. Intervention with hearing aids and/or cochlear implants (CIs) has proven to be highly successful for restoring some aspects of communication, including speech understanding and language acquisition. These challenges are particularly significant in noisy situations, where multiple sound sources often arrive at the ears from various directions. Similarly, adults who lose their hearing after communicating using spoken language have numerous challenges understanding speech and integrating into social situations. Hearing loss can significantly disrupt the ability of children to become mainstreamed in educational environments that emphasize spoken language as a primary means of communication.