We study how people hear. Our lab operates at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and engineering.

Our longterm goals:

• To understand the computational principles underlying human audition
• To improve devices for assisting those whose hearing is impaired
• To design more effective machine systems for recognizing and interpreting sound

Lab Contact Information

Mailing Address: 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 46-4065, Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: (617) 324-7271
Mechanical Turk Inquiries: mcdermott.experiment.one@gmail.com
Dr. McDermott: jhm@mit.edu

From our recent research:

Pitch-sensitive voxels overlap with low-frequency portions of the tonotopic map, and extend anteriorly into regions with weaker frequency-selectivity.

Cortical pitch regions in humans respond primarily to resolved harmonics and are located in specific tonotopic regions of anterior auditory cortex. S Norman-Haignere, N Kanwisher and J H McDermott. The Journal of Neuroscience, vol.33(50), pp. 19451--19469, Dec 2013.