Rate My Professor Joe Toscano

Joe Toscano is an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Villanova University, where he directs the Word Recognition and Auditory Perception (WRAP) Laboratory. Currently on leave from Villanova, he serves as a rotating Program Director in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at the National Science Foundation since 2024. He previously held the position of Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Villanova from 2020 to 2024 and was promoted from Assistant Professor (2014-2021) to Associate Professor in 2021. Toscano earned a B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Psychology with a focus on Cognition and Perception from the University of Iowa in 2011. Prior to joining Villanova, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2011 to 2014.

Toscano's research specializes in speech recognition and language comprehension, examining how listeners recognize words despite acoustic variability, the development of these processes, and their malleability in adulthood. His laboratory employs behavioral experiments, cognitive neuroscience techniques including EEG and fast optical imaging, eye-tracking to measure lexical activation, and computational models of unsupervised statistical learning to study speech perception across timescales. Notable publications include 'Decoding speech sounds from neurophysiological data: Practical considerations and theoretical implications' (Psychophysiology, 2024, with M.E. Sarrett), 'Effects of experience on recognition of speech produced with a face mask' (Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 2022, with A.M. Crinnion and C.M. Toscano), 'Effects of face masks on speech recognition in multi-talker babble noise' (PLOS ONE, 2021, with C.M. Toscano), 'The time-course of cortical responses to speech revealed by fast optical imaging' (Brain & Language, 2018, with N.D. Anderson, M. Fabiani, G. Gratton, and S.M. Garnsey), and 'Electrophysiological evidence for top-down lexical influences on early speech perception' (Psychological Science, 2019, with L.M. Getz). He has received an NSF CAREER Award, a 2022 Villanova Research Catalyst Grant for experiential and neurocognitive mechanisms of language adaptation, and funding from the Hearing Health Foundation for cortical EEG measures of speech sound processing.