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Lori L. Holt is a Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin and a member of Center for Perceptual Systems and the Institute for Neuroscience. She is an expert in auditory cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on understanding how humans interpret the complexity of spoken language. Her research program builds from considering human speech recognition as arising from general, and not uniquely human or speech-specific, mechanisms.
Upon earning her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, Dr. Holt joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University where she was a Professor of the Department of Psychology and the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. In 2023 she moved her laboratory to the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Holt is the recipient of a 21st Century Scientist Award for Mind, Brain and Behavior from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and her research has been recognized by awards from her peers at the Acoustical Society of America, the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association and the National Organization for Hearing Research. In 2007, the Association for Psychological Science named her a Rising Star in Psychology. In 2013, Dr. Holt was awarded the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Binational Science Foundation, the Swedish Tercentenary Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and other foundations.
Dr. Holt is an expert in auditory cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on understanding how humans interpret the complexity of spoken language. Her research program builds from considering human speech recognition as arising from general, and not uniquely human or speech-specific, mechanisms. Her training includes single-unit electrohphysiology and animal behavioral models of audition in addition to human behavioral methods across development. Her current research program exploits human psychophysics and learning paradigms in adults and children, human electrophysiology, neuroimaging, animal behavioral models and acoustic analyses. One branch of her research uses the acquisition of first and second languages as a testing ground for models of auditory learning and categorization; another investigates the role of context in constraining and shaping auditory percepts. In recent work, she has worked closely with colleagues to develop new approaches to examining dimension-based auditory selective attention. The research has implications for critical periods in development, for developmental disabilities involving language and for research on computer understanding of speech.
Dr. Holt teaches undergraduate courses in Research Methods, the Biological Foundations of Behavior and Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience. From 2007-2023 she led the Predoctoral Training Program in Behavioral Brain Research (T32GM081760) as co-Director with Dr. Julie Fiez. Across her tenure, this NIH-supported graduate training program supported more than 50 predoctoral students to integrate behavioral and biomedical techniques in their research.