Rate My Professor Lori Holt

Lori Holt serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, where she also holds affiliations with the Center for Perceptual Systems and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology, with concentrations in Cognitive Psychology and Neurophysiology, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. Her doctoral thesis was titled "Auditory Constraints on Speech Perception: An Examination of Spectral Contrast." Holt received her B.S. in Psychology from the same university in 1995. Following her Ph.D., she joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in 1999, advancing to Associate Professor in 2004 and Professor in 2010. At Carnegie Mellon, she served as co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition from 2022 to 2023 and co-Director of the Behavioral-Brain Research Training Program during the same period. She held courtesy appointments in Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh and in Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon. In 2023, Holt relocated her laboratory to The University of Texas at Austin.

Holt specializes in auditory cognitive neuroscience, investigating speech perception through general auditory mechanisms. Her research integrates human psychophysics and learning paradigms across development, electrophysiology, neuroimaging, animal behavioral models, and acoustic analyses to explore auditory learning, categorization, selective attention, and statistical learning in speech and non-speech contexts. Implications extend to language acquisition, developmental disabilities, and computational speech understanding. Notable publications include "The auditory cognitive neuroscience of speech perception in context" (Holt & Peelle, 2022, Springer Handbook of Auditory Science), "Impaired and spared auditory category learning in developmental dyslexia" (Gabay, Roark, & Holt, 2023, Psychological Science), "Memory for incidentally learned categories evolves in the post-learning interval" (Gabay, Karni, & Holt, 2023, eLife), and "Phonetic category activation predicts the direction and magnitude of perceptual adaptation to accented speech" (Wu & Holt, 2022, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance). She has received the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences (2013), Acoustical Society of America Fellow status (2022), Association for Psychological Science Rising Star award (2007), and 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation (2002-2006). Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and others. Holt teaches undergraduate courses in Research Methods, Biological Foundations of Behavior, and Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience.