EASY LISTENING: Optimizing the consequences of effortful listening in occupational settings
PhD student 5: From real-life to lab and back
In this project, the student will use virtual acoustic scenarios to create laboratory-based listening scenarios that are ecologically valid and predictive for performance and adverse effort effects in daily life of hearing impaired people, and analyse the extent to which hearing aids may improve the balance of positive and negative effects of increased effort. This project combines several scientific and technological methods and draws on expertise from the three groups involved in the project: University of Oldenburg and Hörzentrum Oldenburg provide technology for creating virtual acoustics scenes, as well as example scenes from previous projects. Hörzentrum Oldenburg has expertise in assessing speech understanding and subjective listening effort, and in working with hearing impaired people. The Effort Lab at Liverpool John Moores University provides expertise and equipment to assess effort and fatigue objectively and subjectively. Working in this project provides a unique opportunity to develop a diverse skillset: you will be able to acquire the technical skills required to understand and work in virtual acoustics/virtual reality, as well as the scientific skills to perform empirical research which draws on psychology, statistics, and psychophysics.
The project is organised in several phases: the PhD candidate will spend the first 6 months in Oldenburg, then 18 months in Liverpool, and the final 12 months again in Oldenburg. In Liverpool, the student will develop virtual acoustic scenarios that mimic real-life, challenging listening environments and induce fatigue and stress responses comparable to the responses experienced in the simulated real-life situations. The student will also establish the validity of the scenarios for predicting every-day performance, fatigue, and stress in challenging listening situations. The work in Oldenburg will focus on testing the effect of hearing-aid interventions in the developed virtual acoustic scenarios.
During the entire 36 months the candidate will be enrolled as a PhD student at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg under the supervision of Prof. Volker Hohmann. The supervisor at Liverpool John Moores University will be Dr. Michael Richter. Depending on the outcome of ongoing negotiations between Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg and Liverpool John Moores University, it may be possible to extend the PhD program to a joint PhD program with a dual degree award.
Where will the candidate be working?
The project and the position is a collaborative effort of Hörzentrum Oldenburg, University of Oldenburg, and Liverpoool John Moore’s University. You will be formally hired at HZO with enrolment as a PhD student at UOL, with an extended stay at LJMU.
Hörzentrum Oldenburg
With its audiological products, services and research projects, the Hörzentrum Oldenburg gGmbH improves the technology of hearing systems and the provision of hearing systems for people with hearing impairments. We transfer the results of basic university research into customer-orientated services and products – always with the focus on people.
Our mission “We help people to hear better” motivates our team of 50 to give their best every day. We stand for strong values and principles that are practised in our daily work. We emphasise transparent communication, respectful cooperation and fair conditions. A family-friendly workplace is a matter of course for us. Our actions are based on a high ethical standard, which is also visible to everyone in our scientific work. The meaningfulness of our work is reflected in the result – the improvement of hearing in order to increase the communication skills, participation and quality of life of all people.
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
The goal of the “Auditory Signal Processing and Hearing Devices” lab is to better understand human acoustic communication under challenging listening conditions with noise, clutter, and reverberation, and to use this knowledge to improve signal processing in hearing aids. In particular, the group studies numerical models of auditory scene analysis, methods for hearing aid evaluation in virtual interactive environments, and algorithms for novel hearing devices. PhD students at CvO University can enrol in the Graduate School of Science, Medicine, and Technology (OLTECH) in the structured PhD programme Neurosensory Science and Systems (Curriculum)
Effort Lab of the School of Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University
The Effort Lab conducts research on the determinants and mechanisms of effort investment in goal-directed behaviour employing behavioural and physiological methods. The School of Psychology (https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/faculties/faculty-of-health/school-of-psychology) has more than 60 academic members of staff and a similar number of PhD students. All PhD students are part of the LJMU Doctoral Academy and the LJMU Research Centre in Brain and Behaviour and have access to the state-of-the-art research and training environment of these institutions.
Senior Researchers involved in this project are Kirsten Wagener and Michael Richter.