Education

Bachelor project: Speech processing in the auditory and visual cortex – a behavioral analysis

Starting date: January 2025

Understanding speech in a noisy environment can be very hard. Even more so for hearing impaired listeners. Seeing the person speaking can strongly benefit the understanding of the spoken words. To improve hearing aids, it is crucial to understand how this integration of audio and video works in the brain.

We have therefore conducted a study measuring the brain responses of participants while they were listening to a speaker and seeing that speaker in different versions (normal video, still image, deepfake,…). The neuronal response to the speech was recorded with magnetoencephalography and has been partly evaluated and analyzed.

This bachelor thesis will aim to analyze the behavioral data (how well the participants understood each word that was presented) and relate the behavioral data with the results of the already conducted neural analysis.

Therefore, the data will need to first be labelled manually, then a literature research on different possible automatic labelling algorithms should be performed, the algorithm should be implemented for future participants and lastly the behavioral and the neural data should be analyzed for possible correlations.

The candidate should …

• be able to read and correct German sentences (doesn’t have to be mother tongue, but you should feel comfortable with German).
• be interested in starting to work with python and have basic programming knowledge
• be interested in how the brain processes audio-visual speech
• can optionally attend the ongoing measurements

If you are interested in the project, please send a CV and a transcript of your grades to Jasmin Riegel (jasmin.riegel@fau.de).

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