Tuesday, March 25, 2025
12:10pm-1:30pm
Speaker: Dr. Björn Herrmann
Tier II Canada Research Chair in Auditory Aging; Scientist, Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest; Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Department of Psychology;
Location: MC331 (Mechanical Engineering Building, 5 King’s College Road, Room 331)
Title: Leveraging large language models to advance understanding speech perception challenges in older adults
To help us plan, please register at the below link:
https://shulab.mie.utoronto.ca/events/psycheng-seminar-dr-bjorn-herrmann
Abstract: Conversational speech follows a coherent narrative for which mental representations reflect larger meaningful units of gist across many sentences. Yet, standard speech tests continue to assess verbatim word reports for short, disconnected sentences, despite known limits of predicting real-life speech-comprehension outcomes. This presentation will show how large language models with behavioral and neuroimaging data can provide novel avenues to assess comprehension of naturalistic, narrative-like speech. The presentation will cover new advances of methodological approaches and application with empirical data.
Biography: Dr. Herrmann is the Tier II Canada Research Chair in Auditory Aging, a Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, and an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto. Dr. Herrmann has a bit of a non-traditional career path, leaving school at the age of 16 to work in German industry, receiving an apprenticeship degree in industrial mechanics, and working as a quality control manager in gas turbine manufacturing for Siemens for several years. He obtained is his high-school degree a bit later in life through night school while working for Siemens, before going to university to obtain his Diploma (MSc equivalent) in Communication Psychology and his PhD in Psychology in Germany. He was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain sciences in Germany, at Purdue University in the USA (visiting postdoc), and at Western University in Canada. His research aims to understand the hearing, speech-comprehension, and cognitive challenges that many individuals experience as they age, and how detection and treatment of impairments in these domains can be improved to facilitate optimal aging and a full, joyful life. He tackles these questions from different angles, ranging from mechanistic neurophysiology, hearing and cognitive behavioral science, data-science methods, to qualitative approaches that meet peoples’ experiences in real life.
To help us plan, please register at the below link:
https://shulab.mie.utoronto.ca/events/psycheng-seminar-dr-bjorn-herrmann