Howard Nusbaum
Encyclopedia
Howard C. Nusbaum is professor at the University of Chicago
, United States
in the Department of Psychology and its College, and a steering committee member of the Neuroscience Institute. Nusbaum is an internationally recognized expert in cognitive psychology
, speech science
, and in the new field of social neuroscience
. His work has shown the importance of viewing speech perception
as a cognitive process and elucidating the roles of attention
, learning
and memory
in spoken language understanding more broadly.
, Massachusetts, and obtained a B.A.
in psychology
and computer science
in 1976. He was awarded Doctor of Philosophy
(Ph.D.) from SUNY at Buffalo (New York) in 1981. He then worked as a research associate at Indiana University
(Bloomington, Indiana), and joined the University of Chicago in 1986, where he is a professor. He served as Chair of the psychology department from 1997-2010. Nusbaum is the co-director the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.
Howard Nusbaum has one daughter (Rebecca), and he is married to Anne Henly, the co-director of the undergraduate program in psychology. They live in Hyde Park, Chicago
with their two Newfoundland boys, Newton and Otto.
and social neuroscience
, with an emphasis on spoken language
, because it is one of the primary ways by which humans interact. Nusbaum’s research is concerned with understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms that mediate the use of language and that guide much of human interaction. His work on spoken language processing has emphasized the role of learning
and attention
and working memory
using a number of techniques including functional neuroimaging
, psychophysiological
, and behavioral measures.
Much of Nusbaum's research is on the mechanisms of speech perception and production but recent studies have also examined the development of concepts, emotional processing, and social interaction. Notably, Nusbaum has examined the role of sleep
in consolidating perceptual learning of speech sounds, the cortical mechanisms that mediate perception
of audio-visual speech, the role of gesture
in production and comprehension of speech, and how listeners adjust to differences among talkers.
Current research projects involve understanding the ability of non-human animals to learn language-like structure, examining the role of sleep in illusory memory and perceptuo-motor learning, the processing of emotional information in lonely people, how we use different dimensions of speech to refer to events, how our expectations change the way we understand sensory information. Nusbaum is also involved in interdisciplinary studies in the new field of neuroeconomics
. Together with his colleague John Cacioppo
, he serves as the principal investigator on a John Templeton
grant aiming to develop scholarly investigations into the nature, cultivation, benefits and applications of wisdom
.
has yet to crack the "lack of invariance" problem: there is a many-to-many mapping between the acoustic patterns and percepts. The acoustic signature of a particular phoneme changes as a function of phonetic context, speaking rate, physical characteristics of talkers, dialect, acoustic environment, and so on. How listeners achieve "phonetic constancy" despite these sources of variability largely remains a mystery. The modal approach has been to search for invariant cues that have somehow been missed—that is, to hypothesize that there is no lack of invariance problem aside from the fact that researchers have not discovered how to detect invariant cues available to listeners.
Nusbaum has taken a distinctly contrary position, assuming that the lack of invariance is real rather than apparent, and that the basis for phonetic constancy lies in the processing mechanisms of human speech perception. Nusbaum's early work pioneered the application of cognitive psychological theories of attention and memory to problems in speech perception., Nusbaum's more recent research uses functional neuroimaging
techniques to further explore these issues. For instance, he has demonstrated that increased activity in a temporal-parietal network is associated with increased task demands in a multi-talker context, and that the time-course of relative activity in auditory and motor area during perception of the McGurk effect is consistent with a model of speech perception in which visual-motor information serves as a kind of feedback to augment (and potentially supplant) auditory representations of speech sounds.
His work has also shown that two dissociable networks underlie the use of context in sentence recognition, and that sleep serves an important role in the consolidation of generalizations of phonetic knowledge learned opportunistically through exposure to an unfamiliar talker.
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in the Department of Psychology and its College, and a steering committee member of the Neuroscience Institute. Nusbaum is an internationally recognized expert in cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, speech science
Speech science
Speech science refers to the study of production, transmission and perception of speech. Speech science involves anatomy, in particular the anatomy of the oro-facial region and neuroanatomy, physiology, and acoustics.-Speech production:...
, and in the new field of social neuroscience
Social neuroscience
Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather...
. His work has shown the importance of viewing speech perception
Speech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...
as a cognitive process and elucidating the roles of attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
, learning
Learning
Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...
and memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
in spoken language understanding more broadly.
Background
Nusbaum went to Brandeis UniversityBrandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
, Massachusetts, and obtained a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
in 1976. He was awarded Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
(Ph.D.) from SUNY at Buffalo (New York) in 1981. He then worked as a research associate at Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
(Bloomington, Indiana), and joined the University of Chicago in 1986, where he is a professor. He served as Chair of the psychology department from 1997-2010. Nusbaum is the co-director the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.
Howard Nusbaum has one daughter (Rebecca), and he is married to Anne Henly, the co-director of the undergraduate program in psychology. They live in Hyde Park, Chicago
Hyde Park, Chicago
Hyde Park, located on the South Side of the City of Chicago, in Cook County, Illinois, United States and seven miles south of the Chicago Loop, is a Chicago neighborhood and one of 77 Chicago community areas. It is home to the University of Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Museum of Science...
with their two Newfoundland boys, Newton and Otto.
Academic achievements
Nusbaum's scientific endeavor focuses on cognitionCognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
and social neuroscience
Social neuroscience
Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather...
, with an emphasis on spoken language
Spoken language
Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into...
, because it is one of the primary ways by which humans interact. Nusbaum’s research is concerned with understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms that mediate the use of language and that guide much of human interaction. His work on spoken language processing has emphasized the role of learning
Learning
Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...
and attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
and working memory
Working memory
Working memory has been defined as the system which actively holds information in the mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing...
using a number of techniques including functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...
, psychophysiological
Psychophysiology
Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, and has branched into subspecializations...
, and behavioral measures.
Much of Nusbaum's research is on the mechanisms of speech perception and production but recent studies have also examined the development of concepts, emotional processing, and social interaction. Notably, Nusbaum has examined the role of sleep
Sleep
Sleep is a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness, relatively suspended sensory activity, and inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles. It is distinguished from quiet wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, and is more easily reversible than...
in consolidating perceptual learning of speech sounds, the cortical mechanisms that mediate perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
of audio-visual speech, the role of gesture
Gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body...
in production and comprehension of speech, and how listeners adjust to differences among talkers.
Current research projects involve understanding the ability of non-human animals to learn language-like structure, examining the role of sleep in illusory memory and perceptuo-motor learning, the processing of emotional information in lonely people, how we use different dimensions of speech to refer to events, how our expectations change the way we understand sensory information. Nusbaum is also involved in interdisciplinary studies in the new field of neuroeconomics
Neuroeconomics
Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to choose an optimal course of action. It studies how economic behavior can shape our understanding of the brain, and how neuroscientific discoveries can...
. Together with his colleague John Cacioppo
John Cacioppo
John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded and is Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and the Director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for...
, he serves as the principal investigator on a John Templeton
John Templeton
Sir John Marks Templeton was an American-born British stock investor, businessman and philanthropist.-Biography:...
grant aiming to develop scholarly investigations into the nature, cultivation, benefits and applications of wisdom
Wisdom
Wisdom is a deep understanding and realization of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to apply perceptions, judgements and actions in keeping with this understanding. It often requires control of one's emotional reactions so that universal principles, reason and...
.
Nusbaum contribution to speech research
Despite several decades of concerted effort, research in speech perceptionSpeech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...
has yet to crack the "lack of invariance" problem: there is a many-to-many mapping between the acoustic patterns and percepts. The acoustic signature of a particular phoneme changes as a function of phonetic context, speaking rate, physical characteristics of talkers, dialect, acoustic environment, and so on. How listeners achieve "phonetic constancy" despite these sources of variability largely remains a mystery. The modal approach has been to search for invariant cues that have somehow been missed—that is, to hypothesize that there is no lack of invariance problem aside from the fact that researchers have not discovered how to detect invariant cues available to listeners.
Nusbaum has taken a distinctly contrary position, assuming that the lack of invariance is real rather than apparent, and that the basis for phonetic constancy lies in the processing mechanisms of human speech perception. Nusbaum's early work pioneered the application of cognitive psychological theories of attention and memory to problems in speech perception., Nusbaum's more recent research uses functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...
techniques to further explore these issues. For instance, he has demonstrated that increased activity in a temporal-parietal network is associated with increased task demands in a multi-talker context, and that the time-course of relative activity in auditory and motor area during perception of the McGurk effect is consistent with a model of speech perception in which visual-motor information serves as a kind of feedback to augment (and potentially supplant) auditory representations of speech sounds.
His work has also shown that two dissociable networks underlie the use of context in sentence recognition, and that sleep serves an important role in the consolidation of generalizations of phonetic knowledge learned opportunistically through exposure to an unfamiliar talker.
Society Memberships
Association for Psychological Science; Society for Neuroscience; Cognitive Science Society; Psychonomic Society; Associate Member of the Acoustical Society of America.Selected work
- Monteleone, G. T., Phan, K. L., Nusbaum, H. C., Fitzgerald, D., Hawkley, L. C., Irick, J. S., Fienberg, S. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). Detection of deception using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Well above chance, though well below perfection. Social Neuroscience, 2, 1-11.
- Beilock, S.L., Lyons, I.M., Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H.C., & Small, S.L. (2008). Sports experience changes the neural processing of action language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A., 105, 13269-73.
- Norris, C., Decety, J., Nusbaum, H. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). In the eye of the beholder: Individual differences in perceived social isolation predict regional brain activation to social stimuli. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 1-10.
- Hasson, U., Skipper, J. I., Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L. (2007). Abstract coding of audiovisual speech: beyond sensory representation. Neuron, 56, 1116-1126.
- Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2007). The sound of motion in spoken language: Visual information conveyed by acoustic properties of speech. Cognition, 105, 681-690.
Books
- Schwab, E. C., & Nusbaum, H. C. (Eds.). Pattern recognition by humans and machines: Volume 1, Speech Perception. New York: Academic Press, 1986.
- Schwab, E. C., & Nusbaum, H. C. (Eds.). Pattern recognition by humans and machines: Volume 2, Visual Perception. New York: Academic Press, 1986.
- Goodman, J. C., & Nusbaum, H. C. (Eds.). The development of speech perception: The transition from speech sounds to spoken words. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994.
- Cacioppo, J.T., Tassinary, L. G., & Berntson, G. (Eds.). Methodology Section editor for The Handbook of Psychophysiology. Boston: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
See also
- Affective neuroscienceAffective neuroscienceAffective neuroscience is the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood.-Brain areas related to emotion:...
- NeuroeconomicsNeuroeconomicsNeuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain human decision making, the ability to process multiple alternatives and to choose an optimal course of action. It studies how economic behavior can shape our understanding of the brain, and how neuroscientific discoveries can...
- NeuroscienceNeuroscienceNeuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
- NeuropharmacologyNeuropharmacologyNeuropharmacology is the study of how drugs affect cellular function in the nervous system. There are two main branches of neuropharmacology: behavioral and molecular. Behavioral neuropharmacology focuses on the study of how drugs affect human behavior , including the study of how drug dependence...
- SpeechSpeechSpeech is the human faculty of speaking.It may also refer to:* Public speaking, the process of speaking to a group of people* Manner of articulation, how the body parts involved in making speech are manipulated...
- SleepSleepSleep is a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness, relatively suspended sensory activity, and inactivity of nearly all voluntary muscles. It is distinguished from quiet wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, and is more easily reversible than...
- Social psychologySocial psychologySocial psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
- Social neuroscienceSocial neuroscienceSocial neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather...