Factors that account for inter-individual variability of lateralization performance revealed by correlations of performance among multiple psychoacoustical tasks

Measures of monaural temporal processing and binaural sensitivity were obtained from 12 young (mean age = 26.1 years) and 12 elderly (mean age = 70.9 years) adults with clinically normal hearing (pure-tone thresholds < or = 20 dB HL from 250 to 6000 Hz). Monaural temporal processing was measured by gap detection thresholds. Binaural sensitivity was measured by interaural time difference (ITD) thresholds. Gap and ITD thresholds were obtained at three sound levels (4, 8, or 16 dB above individual threshold). Subjects were also tested on two measures of speech perception, a masking level difference (MLD) task, and a syllable identification/discrimination task that included phonemes varying in voice onset time (VOT). Elderly listeners displayed poorer monaural temporal analysis (higher gap detection thresholds) and poorer binaural processing (higher ITD thresholds) at all sound levels. There were significant interactions between age and sound level, indicating that the age difference was larger at lower stimulus levels. Gap detection performance was found to correlate significantly with performance on the ITD task for young, but not elderly adult listeners. Elderly listeners also performed more poorly than younger listeners on both speech measures; however, there was no significant correlation between psychoacoustic and speech measures of temporal processing. Findings suggest that age-related factors other than peripheral hearing loss contribute to temporal processing deficits of elderly listeners.

Perceptual consequences of disrupted auditory nerve activity were systematically studied in 21 subjects who had been clinically diagnosed with auditory neuropathy (AN), a recently defined disorder characterized by normal outer hair cell function but disrupted auditory nerve function. Neurological and electrophysical evidence suggests that disrupted auditory nerve activity is due to desynchronized or reduced neural activity or both. Psychophysical measures showed that the disrupted neural activity has minimal effects on intensity-related perception, such as loudness discrimination, pitch discrimination at high frequencies, and sound localization using interaural level differences. In contrast, the disrupted neural activity significantly impairs timing related perception, such as pitch discrimination at low frequencies, temporal integration, gap detection, temporal modulation detection, backward and forward masking, signal detection in noise, binaural beats, and sound localization using interaural time differences. These perceptual consequences are the opposite of what is typically observed in cochlear-impaired subjects who have impaired intensity perception but relatively normal temporal processing after taking their impaired intensity perception into account. These differences in perceptual consequences between auditory neuropathy and cochlear damage suggest the use of different neural codes in auditory perception: a suboptimal spike count code for intensity processing, a synchronized spike code for temporal processing, and a duplex code for frequency processing. We also proposed two underlying physiological models based on desynchronized and reduced discharge in the auditory nerve to successfully account for the observed neurological and behavioral data. These methods and measures cannot differentiate between these two AN models, but future studies using electric stimulation of the auditory nerve via a cochlear implant might. These results not only show the unique contribution of neural synchrony to sensory perception but also provide guidance for translational research in terms of better diagnosis and management of human communication disorders.

It is well-known that thresholds for ongoing interaural temporal disparities (ITDs) at high frequencies are larger than threshold ITDs obtained at low frequencies. These differences could reflect true differences in the binaural mechanisms that mediate performance. Alternatively, as suggested by Colburn and Esquissaud [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 59, S23 (1976)], they could reflect differences in the peripheral processing of the stimuli. In order to investigate this issue, threshold ITDs were measured using three types of stimuli: (1) low-frequency pure tones; (2) 100% sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) high-frequency tones, and (3) special, "transposed" high-frequency stimuli whose envelopes were designed to provide the high-frequency channels with information similar to that available in low-frequency channels. The data and their interpretation can be characterized by two general statements. First, threshold ITDs obtained with the transposed stimuli were generally smaller than those obtained with SAM tones and, at modulation frequencies of 128 and 64 Hz, were equal to or smaller than threshold ITDs obtained with their low-frequency pure-tone counterparts. Second, quantitative analyses revealed that the data could be well accounted for via a model based on normalized interaural correlations computed subsequent to known stages of peripheral auditory processing augmented by low-pass filtering of the envelopes within the high-frequency channels of each ear. The data and the results of the quantitative analyses appear to be consistent with the general ideas comprising Colburn and Esquissaud's hypothesis.