Nika at Interspeech and Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

In Dublin and Oxford on selective attention to speech features.

August 22 and 25, Nika Jurov is busy in Ireland and England, giving a talk at INTERSPEECH in Dublin, and a poster at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience in Oxford, reporting work with advisors Naomi Feldman and Bill Idsardi, as well undergraduate research assistant Grayson Wolf. 

• Nika Jurov, William Idsardi and Naomi Feldman / A neural architecture for selective attention to speech features.
• Nika Jurov, Grayson Wolf, William Idsardi and Naomi Feldman / Speech features are weighted by selective attention

Here is the abstract for the latter:

"Listeners typically rely more on one aspect of the speech signal than another when categorizing speech sounds. This is known as feature weighting. We present a rate distortion theory model of feature weighting and use it to ask whether human listeners select feature weights simply by mirroring the feature reliabilities that are present in their input. We show that there is an additional component (selective attention) listeners appear to use that is not reflected by the input statistics. This suggests that an internal mechanism is at play in governing listeners' weighting of different aspects of the speech signal, in addition to tracking statistics."