Understanding sensory differences
Through a collaborative framework of co-design and co-delivery, the NLB Program seeks to deepen our understanding of sensory differences experienced by neurodivergent individuals.
It explores the brain mechanisms that support effective listening and offers practical, evidence-based solutions to address hearing and listening challenges in everyday environments.
Funded by: Martin Lee Centre for Innovations in Hearing Health
About the NLB Program
This research program undertakes a comprehensive exploration of listening through experiential, perception and neural signatures.
Listening is not only a matter of neural transmission – it is also shaped by context, history and agency. This research program therefore integrates lived experience, acknowledging that people understand and navigate sound environments in ways that reflect not just brain activity but emotion, purpose and social meaning.
Rather than positioning listening differences as deficits or impairments, we are interested in what they reveal about how the brain makes sense of complex sensory input, and how these processes can be supported or disrupted by everyday environments.
Our approach is grounded in participatory research and co-production, meaning neurodivergent people are involved in the design, interpretation and application of this work. This research program aims to advance our understanding of how people listen – how they make sense of sound – and how this varies across:
- neurodivergent people
- neurotypical listeners
- those with listening in noise difficulties.
Chief investigator: Professor David McAlpine
Stream leads:
Project coordinator: Dr Jayde Cahir
Engagement officers: Saakshi Maneyalil and Ari Star
Post Doctoral Researchers:
HDR candidate: Lilly Leaver
Collaborators:
NLB advisory group:
- Khalid Mahmoud
- Shazzy Tharby
- Adrienne Te Reo
- Ameha Seyoum Woldu
- Sia Spark
- Kerry Chin
- Kai Schweizer
- three advisory group members have chosen to be anonymous.
- Understand how neurodivergent people and those with Hidden Hearing Loss (ie listening in noise difficulties in the absence of clinical observed hearing loss) experience and navigate everyday auditory environments – including the barriers they face, the strategies they use, and how sensory experiences intersect with wellbeing, regulation, autonomy, and emotional context.
- Identify perceptual patterns and processing strategies that contribute to different listening experiences – such as variation in auditory attention, sensory prediction, and audiovisual integration, especially in complex or noisy environments.
- Investigate the neural dynamics and substrates that support listening – including how brain pathways from ear to cortex modulate attention, sensory filtering, and adaptation across neurodivergent and HHL listeners.
- Develop a research resource that integrates experiential, psychoacoustic and neurological methods – to support and direct future work in inclusive research, technology design, and sensory accessibility.
The experiential research stream investigates everyday auditory experiences among neurodivergent people and those experiencing hidden hearing loss. Using qualitative interviews, large-scale surveys, and ecological assessments, this work characterises how people experience, interpret, and navigate a range of sound environments, such as natural and built settings.
It further seeks to understand the specific sensory qualities within them that positively or negatively shape experience. This stream examines how listening differences influence desired participation, communication, and wellbeing across settings that may be pleasant or aversive to identify the environmental and relational factors that foster a person’s sensory quality of life.
Perception and Neuro-signatures streams explore how individuals process and learn auditory and visual information. These streams focus on understanding how different listeners detect and use statistical regularities within and across sensory modalities, and how differences in these processes may explain challenges such as sensitivity to sensory input or difficulty understanding speech-in-noise.
Applicable methods include psychophysical tasks and physiological measurements (Electroencephalography: EEG and functional infrared spectroscopy: fnirs).
Learn more about what's happening in our program:
Contact
If you identify as neurodivergent and would like to be involved in our work, please contact: nlb_engagement@mq.edu.au
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank our PACE students – Siham Chahine, Rose Doger, and Arwa Quettawala – for their valuable support in helping us develop the NLB Program webpage.