Dr Robert Carlyon

Dr Robert Carlyon leads a research group at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit that investigates the basic processes of both healthy hearing and that experienced by profoundly deaf people whose hearing has been restored by a cochlear implant (CIs).

His group’s research with normal-hearing listeners investigates questions such as how we hear pitch, what physical cues the brain can and cannot use to separate competing sounds, and how sound segregation is affected by attention, linguistic knowledge, and what the listener wants to hear. The research with CIs builds on their remarkable success at restoring hearing to more than 800,000 people worldwide, and investigates the biological limitations of CI hearing.

Dr Carlyon’s group employs a wide range of behavioural, electrophysiological, and imaging techniques, to understand the neural bases for perception and to improve hearing for CI listeners. They work closely with clinical colleagues at the Emmeline Centre for Hearing Implants, and have strong interactions with all four major CI manufacturers.