24.10.23 - Nathalie Giroud

Hearing aid algorithms have become much more sophisticated, tailored to the individual needs of persons with hearing impairment and speech communication deficits. Positive effects have been shown on behavioral and neural processing of speech sounds. Combining hearing aids with behavioral speech communication training has further been suggested to improve rehabilitation, at least under some circumstances and in the short term, while several methodological shortcomings of training evaluations do not always allow for conclusive interpretation of existing data. Also, very little is known about individual differences in the degree of benefit of such trainings (e.g., in health vs. at-risk of dementia). In this presentation I will discuss several studies from our lab in which we have evaluated behavioral and neural plasticity after in-house developed mobile phone applications for training, addressing the shortcomings of previous research. We further increased ecological validity in training and transfer tasks for larger impact on communication in daily life and use state-of-the-art technological advancements such as stereoscopic virtual reality combined with EEG or gamified, personalized and adaptive auditory-cognitive games to make trainings more fun and engaging.