Description:

Beverly Wright, PhD
Professor
School of Communications
Northwestern University

Abstract:
The premise of rehabilitation is that impaired abilities can be restored or improved through practice. Because the goal is to facilitate particular skills, rehabilitation strategies typically are designed with a focus on determining the training tasks that best target those skills. Therapeutic successes are then accredited to the judicious selection of training assignments, while failures are attributed to noncompliance or to fundamental limits imposed by the proximal cause of the impairment. However, successful skill learning also depends on the appropriate selection of the training schedule and of the population to be trained, due to constraints on the learning systems themselves. My coworkers and I have been investigating these learning constraints by characterizing the factors that induce and those that prevent perceptual learning on auditory skills, including how those factors change with age and are affected by sensory and cognitive disorders. Conclusions drawn from learning on fine-grained auditory discrimination tasks have held for visual and speech learning, suggesting that common principles are at play across multiple domains. Application of these principles could improve clinical training strategies. Further, though learning is the foundation for behavioral rehabilitation, the capacity to learn can itself be impaired. Therefore, an individual’s response to training could be used as an objective, clinical measure to guide diagnosis and treatment of a cognitive disorder.

Bio:
Bev Wright is a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and director of the Knowles Hearing Center at Northwestern University. She has a B.A. in English and linguistics from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. She did postdoctoral research at the University of Florida and the University of California San Francisco before joining the faculty at Northwestern University in 1997. She is a recipient of the R. Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America, and the Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring in the School of Communication at Northwestern. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. Her primary research interests are perceptual learning, language-based learning problems, and auditory psychophysics.