{"id":4676,"date":"2022-10-06T20:40:54","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T20:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/tiered-mentoring\/?p=4676"},"modified":"2022-10-06T20:40:54","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T20:40:54","slug":"auditory-perception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/tiered-mentoring\/2022\/10\/06\/auditory-perception\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m too freaked out to hear you!\u2019 How early-life stress affects auditory perception and the brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Merri Rosen, Kate Hardy, Matthew Sunthimer (NEOMED)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Research Area
\n<\/span><\/strong><\/span>It\u2019s well-known that hearing problems in kids may cause later trouble with understanding complex sounds, such as speech in a place with a lot of background noise. But our lab is the first to show that early-life stress (ELS) during development can cause similar problems. Many labs have studied the effects of ELS on the development of brain regions responsible for attention, learning, and related psychopathologies. Our work has found that auditory information is not being encoded properly before it even reaches these higher-level brain regions. This is important, because children who grow up in low-socioeconomic, high stress environments are at risk for later problems with speech perception. Discovering what is going wrong mechanistically will help prevent and remediate these problems.<\/span><\/figure>\n
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We\u2019re funded by the National Institutes of Health to study the neural mechanisms that can cause stress-induced deficits in auditory perception. It turns out that ELS may be a particular problem when kids have ear infections that cause intermittent hearing loss \u2013 our data show that early hearing loss and stress together are much worse than either one alone! We use an animal model that is well-established in auditory research \u2013 the Mongolian gerbil \u2013 because gerbils hear well at frequencies that humans use, unlike mice or rats.<\/span><\/figure>\n

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Current Project
\n<\/strong><\/span>We are looking for a student to assist in t<\/span>esting gerbils on behavioral tasks to measure their auditory perception and learning abilities, and q<\/span>uantify animal behavior using video analysis<\/span><\/p>\n

Students will:<\/span><\/p>\n