Dante Smith presents his research at the Society for Neuroscience 2017 meeting in Washington D.C.
From November 11 – 15, 2017, graduate student Dante Smith had the opportunity to attend the Society for Neuroscience 2017 meeting and present his research.
At this meeting he presented a poster on his project investigating voice motor control, and the vocal responses by human subjects when they experienced changes to their somatosensory feedback. In these experiments, participants vocalized a steady-state vowel, while having the position of their larynx non-invasively displaced. These participants could not hear their own voice during this task, by method of loud masking noise present in headphones, and thus any recorded response was a result of correcting for changes to their somatosensory feedback. Characterizing how participants modulate their voice to correct for errors will improve our understanding of voice motor control and allow for the creation of more robust and efficient voice disorder therapies.
Dante’s poster received interest and feedback from students, post-docs and professors working in speech neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and rehabilitation science. While making new contacts with international researchers and shared ideas on experimental design, analysis of speech samples, and speech motor control theory, Dante looks forward to his next scientific conference where he can further share projects and ideas about speech neuroscience.
