Edmund Lalor
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
How does the brain turn a stream of sound and sight into meaning, and what goes wrong when perception breaks down? These projects study how the human brain processes natural, continuous input, such as everyday speech, a talking face, or flickering images.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
electroencephalography
schizophrenia
bipolar disorder
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Nov 2029
What they work on
- Measure "perceptual echoes", reverberating responses in early visual cortex, with high-density EEG to isolate top-down predictive feedback in healthy volunteers and in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
- Use a strong visual illusion to separate weak changes in the image from strong top-down expectations, deriving EEG impulse response functions that index predictive feedback in early visual processing.
- Test with linear mixed effects models whether EEG and brain-connectivity measures of top-down prediction relate to positive psychosis symptoms, such as hallucinations, across diagnoses.
- Test whether the brain's tracking of speech reflects entrained brain oscillations, summed evoked responses, or both, by modeling scalp EEG from adults hearing natural and manipulated speech under different attention conditions.
- Apply the same evoked and oscillation models to intracranial recordings from neurosurgical patients to test whether these mechanisms differ across areas of the speech and language pathway.
- Test whether lip motion that moves in step with speech sharpens auditory attention, while visible mouth shapes help sort sounds into phonemes, by modeling brain responses to natural audiovisual speech.
- Compare how visual speech shapes auditory processing in typically hearing people and in deaf individuals with and without cochlear implants, to test whether hearing experience changes how vision is used.
More about the research
They record electroencephalography (EEG), the brain's electrical activity measured from the scalp, while people listen and watch. Computational models then separate the different neural processes mixed together in those signals. The same approach is used to ask basic questions about speech and hearing and to look for objective brain markers of psychosis.
Why it matters
For people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, these studies could yield objective brain-based measures of psychosis symptoms. Such measures may support earlier detection and biologically grounded ways to classify psychotic disorders, as an alternative to symptom checklists alone. The speech work could sharpen how EEG findings are interpreted in clinical groups. Studying deaf individuals with and without cochlear implants may also inform how visual cues support speech understanding for people with hearing loss.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Natural audiovisual speech encoding in the early stages of the human cortical hierarchy
NIH · Mar 2018 – Nov 2029
Characterizing the generative mechanisms underlying the cortical tracking of natural speech
NIH · Jul 2023 – Jun 2028
Visual perception in schizophrenia: assessing predictive processing in the earliest stages of the visual cortical hierarchy
NIH · May 2025 – May 2027
Closest labs
Judy Thompson
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia are linked to impaired neural encoding of speech, by modeling EEG brain responses to clear and acoustically degraded speech in patients with and without hallucinations and in healthy controls.
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
Adeen Flinker
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Map the integration periods, the time windows over which neurons combine sound, across primary and non-primary auditory cortex, using direct cortical recordings in neurosurgical patients.
The school
University of Rochester: 38 labs on PI Pages, $492M a year on research, 308 research doctorates a year.
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