Matthew Richardson
University of California-Irvine, CA·Neuroscience
Cochlear implants restore hearing by stimulating the auditory nerve with electrical pulses, and many users understand speech well in quiet rooms. Yet even the best users barely sense the cycle-by-cycle timing of sound waves, called temporal fine structure, which the brain uses to hear pitch.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Physiology
- Topics
cochlear implant
auditory prosthesis
intraneural electrode
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Test whether selective intraneural stimulation of apical (low-frequency) auditory nerve fibers improves cats' behavioral discrimination of temporal pitch compared with a conventional cochlear implant electrode, alongside eFFR scalp recordings.
- Assess whether a CI+1 hybrid implant can combine intraneural and cochlear-implant stimulation for multi-channel sound coding, and whether timing sensitivity to intraneural stimulation survives alongside conventional implant stimulation.
- Examine how long-term deafness degrades temporal pitch perception in implanted cats, as a model of adult implant recipients with prolonged hearing loss.
- Test whether daily CI+1 stimulation, especially intraneural stimulation of apical pathways, can drive brain plasticity that restores sensitivity to sound's fine timing after long-term deafness.
More about the research
Without good pitch, people struggle to separate voices in a noisy classroom or restaurant. They also miss emotional tone and the tones of tonal languages, and enjoy music less. This project tests whether a different kind of electrode could fill that gap.
Why it matters
Millions of cochlear implant users hear speech in quiet but struggle in noise, with emotional and tonal cues in speech, and with music, because they perceive pitch poorly. By setting preclinical milestones for a hybrid implant with a nerve-penetrating electrode, this work could guide development of devices that add low-frequency hearing and sharper pitch perception, including for adults with long-term hearing loss.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gunnar Quass
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Neuroscience
Record high-density activity of auditory cortex neurons in deafened mice over weeks as they learn a reward-based cochlear implant task, testing whether synchronized stimulation disrupts formation of small neuron networks.
R. Burger
Lehigh University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether overexpressing BMP7, a signaling protein that patterns the early ear, repatterns the frequency tuning of hair cells in the chick inner ear toward low-frequency types.
Kevin Sitek
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience·Early-career
Use the frequency-following response, a scalp recording of how faithfully early auditory structures encode a sound, to determine when and where auditory-motor interactions occur during self-generated sounds, subcortically or in primary auditory cortex.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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