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Selected Publications

Whitham, W., Karstadt, B., Anderson, N. C., Bischof, W. F., Schapiro, S. J., Kingstone, A., Coss, R., Birmingham, E., & Yorzinski, J. L. (2024). Predator gaze captures both human and chimpanzee attention. PloS one, 19(11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311673 

Scheerer, N. E., Boucher, T. Q., Arzanpour, S., Iarocci, G., & Birmingham, E. (2024). Autistic and non-autistic experiences of decreased sound tolerance and their association with Mental Health and quality of life. Autism in Adulthood. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2023.0117 

Bahmei, B., Birmingham, E., & Arzanpour, S. (2023). Misophonia sound recognition using vision transformer. 2023 45th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/embc40787.2023.10340283 

Bahmei, B., Birmingham, E., & Arzanpour, S. (2022). CNN-RNN and data augmentation using deep convolutional generative adversarial network for environmental sound classification. IEEE Signal Processing Letters29, 682-686.

Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2022). Social attention as a general mechanism? Demonstrating the influence of stimulus content factors on social attentional biasing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance48(4), 289

Pereira, E. J., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J.  (2022). Infrequent faces bias social attention differently in manual and oculomotor measures. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics84(3), 829-842.

Birmingham E, Arzanpour S, Bahmei B. (2021). System and method for ambient noise detection, identification and management. (World Patent No. WO2021119806). World Intellectual Property Organization. https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2021119806

Scheerer, N. E., Boucher, T. Q., Bahmei, B., Iarocci, G., Arzanpour, S., & Birmingham, E. (2021). Family experiences of decreased sound tolerance in ASD. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1-15.

Scheerer, N. E., Birmingham, E., Boucher, T. Q., & Iarocci, G. (2021). Attention capture by trains and faces in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Plos one16(6), e0250763.

Trevisan, D. A., Leach, S., Iarocci, G., & Birmingham, E. (2021). Evaluation of a peer mentorship program for autistic college students. Autism in Adulthood3(2), 187-194.

Trevisan, D. A., Enns, J. T., Birmingham, E., & Iarocci, G. (2021). Action coordination during a real-world task: Evidence from children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Development and Psychopathology33(1), 65-75.

Pereira, E., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2019). Contextually-based social attention diverges across covert and overt measures.  Vision, 3(2), 29. doi: 10.3390/vision3020029.

Pereira, E., Birmingham, E., & Ristic, J. (2019). The eyes don’t have it after all? Attention is not automatically biased towards faces and eyes.  Psychological Research, Published first online Jan 2, 2019, doi: 10.1007/s00426-018-1130-4. 

Trevisan, D. A., Hoskyn, M. & Birmingham, E. (2018). Facial expression production in Autism: a meta‐analysis. Autism Research, 11, 1586-1601. doi:10.1002/aur.2037.

Birmingham, E., Svärd, J., Kanan, C., & Fischer, H. (2018). Exploring emotional expression recognition in aging adults using the Moving Window Technique. PLOS One13(10), e0205341, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205341.

Trevisan, D.A., Roberts, N., Lin, C., & Birmingham, E. (2017). How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? A qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts. PLOS One, 12(11), e0188446. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0188446.

Birmingham, E., Johnston, K.H.S., & Iarocci, G. (2017).  Spontaneous gaze following during naturalistic social interactions in school-aged children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(3), 243-257, doi: 10.1037/cep0000131.

Roberts, N., & Birmingham, E. (2017). Mentoring university students with ASD: a mentee-centered approach. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(4), 1038-1050, doi: 10.1007/s10803-016-2997-9.  

Trevisan, D.A., Bowering, M., & Birmingham, E. (2016).  Alexithymia, but not autism spectrum disorder, may be related to the production of emotional facial expressions. Molecular Autism, 7:46, 1-12, doi: 10.1186/s13229-016-0108-6.  

Trevisan, D.A., & Birmingham, E. (2016). Are emotion recognition abilities related to everyday social functioning in ASD? A meta-analysis. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders32, 24-42, doi: 10.1016/j.rasd.2016.08.004

Trevisan, D.A., & Birmingham, E. (2015). Examining the relationship between autistic traits and college adjustment. Autism, 20(6), 719-729.  doi: 10.1177/1362361315604530

Birmingham, E.*, Stanley, D.*, Nair, R., & Adolphs, R. (2015). Implicit social biases in people with Autism. Psychological Science, 26(11): 1693-1705, doi: 10.1177/0956797615595607.  *D. Stanley and I contributed equally to the paper.

Dalrymple, K., Gray, A., Perler, B., Birmingham, E., Bischof, W.F., Barton, J., & Kingstone, A. (2013).  Eying the eyes in social scenes: Evidence for top-down control of stimulus selection in simultanagnosia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 30(1), 25-40, doi: 10.1080/02643294.2013.778234.  

Birmingham, E., Meixner, T., Iarocci, G., Kanan, C., Smilek, D., & Tanaka, J. (2013). The Moving Window Technique: a window into developmental changes in attention during facial emotion recognition. Child Development, 84(4): 1407-24, doi: 10.1111/cdev.12039.

Birmingham, E., Cerf, M., & Adolphs, R. (2011). Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: effects of stimulus and task condition. Social Neuroscience, 6(5-6), 420-435, doi: 10.1080/17470919.2011.561547.

Dalrymple, K.A., Birmingham, E., Bischof, W., Barton, J.J.S., & Kingstone, A. (2011). Opening a window on attention: Documenting and simulating recovery from simultanagnosia, Cortex, 47(7), 787-99, doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2010.07.00.  

Dalrymple, K.A., Birmingham, E., Bischof, W., Barton, J.J.S., & Kingstone, A. (2011). Experiencing simultanagnosia through windowed viewing of complex social scenes. Brain Research, 1367(7), 265-277, doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2010.10.022.  

SELECTED PRE-PRINTS

Real-Time Speech Enhancement via a Hybrid ViT: A Dual-Input Acoustic-Image Feature Fusion

Bahmei, B., Arzanpour, S., & Birmingham, E. (2025). Real-Time Speech Enhancement via a Hybrid ViT: A Dual-Input Acoustic-Image Feature Fusion. Preprint on arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.11825

Summary:
This work proposes a novel transformer-based framework for real-time single-channel noise suppression. By fusing acoustic and image-like spectral features through a hybrid Vision Transformer (ViT), the model captures both temporal and spectral relationships in noisy signals. The method is optimized for real-world, non-stationary noise (e.g., dogs, infants) and is lightweight enough for embedded devices. Evaluated using PESQ, STOI, SegSNR, and LLR metrics on Librispeech, UrbanSound8K, and Audioset, the model shows substantial improvements in perceptual speech quality and intelligibility, approaching clean-speech performance.

Status: Preprint posted to arXiv (Nov 2025)