UF neuroscientist receives grant to study brain’s processing of sound

University of Florida faculty member Purvis Bedenbaugh has won a $232,000 grant to study the brain’s processing of a variety of background and foreground sounds.

Bedenbaugh, an assistant professor in the College of Medicine’s neuroscience department who also is affiliated with UF’s Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute, received the grant from the Virginia-based Whitaker Foundation. His project was one of 26 funded recently through the foundation’s biomedical engineering research grant program.

Bedenbaugh’s experiments are designed to measure how different types of background noise affect the brain’s ability to process foreground sounds. One of the test noises he uses was developed in part by Alice E. Holmes, an associate professor in the College of Health Professions’ department of communicative disorders.

Knowledge about the brain’s processing of sound could have several applications, including guiding rehabilitation efforts for repairing damaged areas of the brain. Additionally, by better understanding how the human brain processes background and foreground sounds, scientists eventually may be able to improve voice-recognition software, whose effectiveness often is limited by background noise.

Founded in 1975, the nonprofit Whitaker Foundation is dedicated to the belief that engineering can improve medical care.