Newsletter 1

Our first week is over here at team neuraltone, and we’ve begun planning for our upcoming semester working with the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Our client, Dr. Lori Holt, is studying how the brain handles categorization of sounds, specifically focusing on how the brain perceives language specific sounds. For example, native speakers of Japanese cannot differentiate between the “l” and “r” sounds.

Dr. Holt, alongside Dr. Sung-Joo Lim, is working with a video game that helps train players to hear the difference between sounds that they otherwise cannot detect. Training with this simple Space Invaders

game helps native speakers improve their abilities to detect differences in sounds much more quickly than traditional feedback-based training.

Our team has been tasked with updating this game to better serve the needs of researchers at the CNBC and to help improve the usability of the game for research subjects. We chose the name “neuraltone” to reflect the most important aspect of this project: the human brain and it’s interaction with sound.

We are just getting started here at team neuraltone, and we can’t wait to see what we can make of this project!