Research in the CAT Lab is focused on the cognitive processes that occur within complex listening environments, e.g., attention, distraction, working memory, auditory processing, executive function. The goal of the lab is to understand why listening is difficult in certain situations, and how individual differences in our listening abilities might contribute to changes in performance during behavioral listening tasks.

We are interested in how these processes occur in typical healthy adults, and how they may change over time in an aging population as well as in those with hearing or listening disorders.

These cognitive processes can also be applied to tinnitus (ringing in the ears). We are interested in how tinnitus can be quantified using cognitive tasks, and how these behavioral measures can be applied to a clinical population to evaluate the efficacy of various treatment options.