Dr. Robert Dooling

Research Interests

Research in my laboratory of comparative psychoacoustics is aimed at understanding how animals communicate with one another using sound and whether there are parallels with how humans communicate with one another using speech and language. Birds such as songbirds and parrots, like humans, rely on hearing and learning to develop a normal vocal repertoire. We often study budgerigars, canaries, zebra finches, and other small birds because they learn their species-specific vocalizations that bears some similarity to how humans learn speech and language. We have specific projects on vocal learning and vocal development in budgerigars, how hearing loss affects vocal behavior, whether newly regenerated auditory sensory hair cells result in a recovery of hearing and vocal behavior, how noise affects hearing, and whether there are syntactical features birdsong.

Education

• PhD Saint Louis University, Physiological Psychology
• MS Saint Louis University, Biology
• BS Creighton University, Biology/Chemistry