A recent study led by Bruce Tomblin, UI professor of communication sciences and disorders, found that greater improvement in hearing via hearing aids led to better speech and language skills for children with mild and moderate-to-severe hearing loss.
Next time something you hear goes in one ear and out the other, you have a built-in excuse. Just blame it on your Achilles’ ear—a weakness that lies not in a mythical hero’s heel, but in the real-life way the brain processes sound and memory, according to new UI research.
UI researchers had subjects listen to, watch, and blindly touch a variety of everyday sounds, silent videos, and common objects, and found that after an hour, a day or a week, seeing and touching trumps listening when it comes to remembering.
New research out of the University of Iowa, published in PLOS One, suggests that those moments when we forget something we were told are particularly human—that people’s memory for things they hear is just not that great.
When it comes to memory, we don’t remember things we hear nearly as well as things we see or touch, scientists say. Researchers at the University of Iowa found our memory for sounds is significantly worse than our memory for visual or tactile things.
