Psychoacoustics publications

Background: Nonbehavioral methods for identifying cisplatin ototoxicity are important for testing patients with cancer who become too tired or sick to provide a reliable response. The auditory brainstem response (ABR) is a nonbehavioral test that is sensitive to ototoxicity but can be time consuming to implement over a range of frequencies and/or levels. To address this issue, trains of stimuli were developed that offer reliable ABR testing over a range of tone-burst frequencies and levels at a time savings of 77% relative to tone-burst stimuli presented individually. The clinical accuracy of this new method has yet to be determined on a clinical population. Purpose: This project was designed to determine the test performance of a time-effective ABR methodology aimed at identifying hearing shifts from cisplatin among veterans. A secondary goal was to determine whether improved test performance could be achieved by including our previously developed ototoxicity risk assessment model in the ABR prediction algorithm. Research Design: A set of discriminant functions were derived using logistic regression to model the risk for cisplatin-induced hearing change. Independent variables were one of several ABR metrics alone and combined with an ototoxicity risk assessment model that includes pre-exposure hearing and cisplatin dose. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to evaluate the test performance of these discriminant functions. Study Sample: Twenty-two male veterans treated with cisplatin for various cancers provided data from a total of 71 monitoring appointments. Data Collection and Analysis: Data were collected prospectively from one ear of each participant as designated below. Hearing shift was determined for frequencies within an octave of each patient's high-frequency hearing limit, tested in 1/6th-octave steps. ABRs were monitored using a set of two intensity trains from the highest two multiple frequency tone-burst center frequencies (up to 11.3 kHz) that yielded a robust response at baseline. Each intensity train was presented at 65‐105 dB peSPL in 10 dB steps. Scorable ABRs were generally limited to the highest two intensities; therefore, analyses concern those levels. Results: The ABR measurement failure was high, up to 52% for some frequencies and levels. Furthermore, the ABR was not frequently obtained at levels below 85 dB peSPL, consistent with previous studies that suggest a stimulus level of greater than 80 dB peSPL is required to obtain a reliable response to trained stimuli. Using multivariate metrics that included the dose-ototoxicity model, the most accurate scoring function was change in amplitude at lowest half-octave frequency obtained at 105 dB (change in wave V amplitude at frequency 2/105). However, absence of wave V at a monitor patient visit of the ABR response at levels 105 or 95 dB peSPL was deemed the preferred scoring function, because it had lower measurement failure and was within one standard error of the most accurate function. Conclusions: Because of the large number of responses that could not be measured at baseline, this technique as implemented holds limited value as an ototoxicity-monitoring method.

Tinnitus has a complex etiology that involves auditory and non-auditory factors and may be accompanied by hyperacusis, anxiety and cognitive changes. Thus far, investigations of the interrelationship between tinnitus and auditory and non-auditory impairment have yielded conflicting results. To further address this issue, we noise exposed rats and assessed them for tinnitus using a gap detection behavioral paradigm combined with statistically-driven analysis to diagnose tinnitus in individual rats. We also tested rats for hearing detection, responsivity, and loss using prepulse inhibition and auditory brainstem response, and for spatial cognition and anxiety using Morris water maze and elevated plus maze. We found that our tinnitus diagnosis method reliably separated noise-exposed rats into tinnitus((+)) and tinnitus((-)) groups and detected no evidence of tinnitus in tinnitus((-)) and control rats. In addition, the tinnitus((+)) group demonstrated enhanced startle amplitude, indicating hyperacusis-like behavior. Despite these results, neither tinnitus, hyperacusis nor hearing loss yielded any significant effects on spatial learning and memory or anxiety, though a majority of rats with the highest anxiety levels had tinnitus. These findings showed that we were able to develop a clinically relevant tinnitus((+)) group and that our diagnosis method is sound. At the same time, like clinical studies, we found that tinnitus does not always result in cognitive-emotional dysfunction, although tinnitus may predispose subjects to certain impairment like anxiety. Other behavioral assessments may be needed to further define the relationship between tinnitus and anxiety, cognitive deficits, and other impairments.

Many natural sounds fluctuate over time. The detectability of sounds in a sequence can be reduced by prior stimulation in a process known as forward masking. Forward masking is thought to reflect neural adaptation or neural persistence in the auditory nervous system, but it has been unclear where in the auditory pathway this processing occurs. To address this issue, the present study used a "Huggins pitch" stimulus, the perceptual effects of which depend on central auditory processing. Huggins pitch is an illusory tonal sensation produced when the same noise is presented to the two ears except for a narrow frequency band that is different (decorrelated) between the ears. The pitch sensation depends on the combination of the inputs to the two ears, a process that first occurs at the level of the superior olivary complex in the brainstem. Here it is shown that a Huggins pitch stimulus produces more forward masking in the frequency region of the decorrelation than a noise stimulus identical to the Huggins-pitch stimulus except with perfect correlation between the ears. This stimulus has a peripheral neural representation that is identical to that of the Huggins-pitch stimulus. The results show that processing in, or central to, the superior olivary complex can contribute to forward masking in human listeners.

Disruption of neuronal migration in humans is associated with a wide range of behavioral and cognitive outcomes including severe intellectual disability, language impairment, and social dysfunction. Furthermore, malformations of cortical development have been observed in a number of neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g. autism and dyslexia), where boys are much more commonly diagnosed than girls (estimates around 4 to 1). The use of rodent models provides an excellent means to examine how sex may modulate behavioral outcomes in the presence of comparable abnormal neuroanatomical presentations. Initially characterized by Rosen et al. 2012, the BXD29- Tlr4(lps-2J) /J mouse mutant exhibits a highly penetrant neuroanatomical phenotype that consists of bilateral midline subcortical nodular heterotopia with partial callosal agenesis. In the current study, we confirm our initial findings of a severe impairment in rapid auditory processing in affected male mice. We also report that BXD29- Tlr4(lps-2J) /J (mutant) female mice show no sparing of rapid auditory processing, and in fact show deficits similar to mutant males. Interestingly, female BXD29- Tlr4(lps-2J) /J mice do display superiority in Morris water maze performance as compared to wild type females, an affect not seen in mutant males. Finally, we report new evidence that BXD29- Tlr4(lps-2J) /J mice, in general, show evidence of hyper-social behaviors. In closing, the use of the BXD29- Tlr4(lps-2J) /J strain of mice - with its strong behavioral and neuroanatomical phenotype - may be highly useful in characterizing sex independent versus dependent mechanisms that interact with neural reorganization, as well as clinically relevant abnormal behavior resulting from aberrant neuronal migration.

A psychophysical matching paradigm has been used to better quantify voice quality under laboratory conditions. The goals of this study were to establish which of two candidate comparison stimuli would best ensure that the range of perceived vocal roughness could be adequately bracketed using a matching task and to provide a general solution to the problem of estimating vocal roughness. Psychometric functions for roughness matching indicated that a speech-like sawtooth-plus-noise complex (20 dB signal-to-noise ratio) amplitude modulated by a sinusoidal function raised to the 4th power yielded a comparison stimulus with a perceptual dynamic range well suited for roughness matching.

Dynamic range compression is widely used to reduce the difference between the most and least intense portions of a signal. Such compression distorts the shape of the amplitude envelope of a signal, but it is unclear to what extent such distortions are actually perceivable by listeners. Here, the ability to distinguish between compressed and uncompressed versions of a noise vocoded sentence was initially measured in listeners with normal hearing while varying the threshold, ratio, attack, and release parameters. This narrow condition was selected in order to characterize perception under the most favorable listening conditions. The average behavioral sensitivity to compression was highly correlated to several acoustical indices of modulation depth. In particular, performance was highly correlated to the Euclidean distance between the modulation spectra of the uncompressed and compressed signals. Suggesting that this relationship is not restricted to the initial test conditions, the correlation remained largely unchanged both (1) when listeners with normal hearing were tested using a time-compressed version of the original signal, and (2) when listeners with impaired hearing were tested using the original signal. If this relationship generalizes to more ecologically valid conditions, it will provide a straightforward method for predicting the detectability of compression-induced distortions.

A Bayesian adaptive procedure for estimating the auditory-filter shape was proposed and evaluated using young, normal-hearing listeners at moderate stimulus levels. The resulting quick-auditory-filter (qAF) procedure assumed the power spectrum model of masking with the auditory-filter shape being modeled using a spectrally symmetric, two-parameter rounded-exponential (roex) function. During data collection using the qAF procedure, listeners detected the presence of a pure-tone signal presented in the spectral notch of a noise masker. Dependent on the listener's response on each trial, the posterior probability distributions of the model parameters were updated, and the resulting parameter estimates were then used to optimize the choice of stimulus parameters for the subsequent trials. Results showed that the qAF procedure gave similar parameter estimates to the traditional threshold-based procedure in many cases and was able to reasonably predict the masked signal thresholds. Additional measurements suggested that occasional failures of the qAF procedure to reliably converge could be a consequence of incorrect responses early in a qAF track. The addition of a parameter describing lapses of attention reduced the likelihood of such failures.

Temporal variation in listeners' sensitivity to interaural time and level differences (ITD and ILD) was assessed using the temporal weighting function (TWF) paradigm [Stecker and Hafter (2002). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 112, 1046–1057] in the context of sound-source lateralization. Brief Gabor click trains were presented over headphones with overall ITD and/or ILD ranging ±500 μs ITD and/or ±5 dB ILD across trials; values for individual clicks within each train varied by an additional ±100 μs or ±2 dB to allow TWF calculation by multiple regression. In separate conditions, TWFs were measured for (i) ITD alone, (ii) ILD alone, (iii) ITD and ILD covarying (“in agreement”), and (iv) ITD and ILD varying independently across clicks. Consistent with past studies that measured TWF for binaural discrimination, TWFs demonstrated high weight on the first click for stimuli with short interclick interval (ICI = 2 ms), but flatter weighting for longer ICI (5–10 ms). Some conditions additionally demonstrated greater weight for clicks near the offset than near the middle of the train [Stecker and Hafter (2009). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 3914–3924]. The latter result was observed only when stimuli carried ILD, and appeared more reliably for 5 ms than for 2 or 10 ms ICI.

While it is commonly held that the capacity to learn is greatest in the young, there have been few direct comparisons of the response to training across age groups. Here, adolescents (11–17 years, n = 20) and adults (≥18 years, n = 11) practiced detecting a backward-masked tone for ∼1 h/day for 10 days. Nearly every adult, but only half of the adolescents improved across sessions, and the adolescents who learned did so more slowly than adults. Nevertheless, the adolescent and adult learners showed the same generalization pattern, improving on untrained backward- but not forward- or simultaneous-masking conditions. Another subset of adolescents (n = 6) actually got worse on the trained condition. This worsening, unlike learning, generalized to an untrained forward-masking, but not backward-masking condition. Within sessions, both age groups got worse, but the worsening was greater for adolescents. These maturational changes in the response to training largely followed those previously reported for temporal-interval discrimination. Overall, the results suggest that late-maturing processes affect the response to perceptual training and that some of these processes may be shared between tasks. Further, the different developmental rates for learning and generalization, and different generalization patterns for learning and worsening imply that learning, generalization, and worsening may have different origins.

This study compared the dependence of comodulation masking release (CMR) and monaural envelope correlation perception (MECP) on the degree of envelope correlation for the same narrowband noise stimuli. Envelope correlation across noise bands was systematically varied by mixing independent bands with a base set of comodulated bands. The magnitude of CMR fell monotonically with reductions in envelope correlation, and CMR varied over a range of envelope correlations that were not discriminable from each other in the MECP paradigm. For complexes of 100-Hz-wide noise bands, discrimination thresholds in the MECP task were similar whether the standard was a comodulated set of noise bands or a completely independent set of noise bands. This was not the case for 25-Hz-wide noise bands. Although the data demonstrate that CMR and MECP exhibit different dependencies on the degree of envelope correlation, some commonality across the two phenomena was observed. Specifically, for 25-Hz-wide bands of noise, there was a robust relationship between individual listeners' sensitivity to decorrelation from an otherwise comodulated set of noise bands and the magnitude of CMR measured for those same comodulated noise bands.

The precedence effect (PE) refers to the dominance of directional information carried by a direct sound (lead) over the spatial information contained in its multiple reflections (lags) in sound localization. Although the processes underlying the PE have been largely investigated, the extent to which peripheral versus central auditory processes contribute to this perceptual phenomenon has remained unclear. The present study investigated the contribution of peripheral processing to the PE through a comparison of physiological and psychoacoustical data in the same human listeners. The psychoacoustical experiments, comprising a fusion task, an interaural time difference detection task and a lateralization task, demonstrated a time range from 1 to 4.6-5 ms, in which the PE operated (precedence window). Click-evoked otoacoustic emissions (CEOAEs) were recorded in both ears to investigate the lead-lag interactions at the level of the basilar membrane (BM) in the cochlea. The CEOAE-derived peripheral and monaural lag suppression was largest for ICIs of 1-4 ms. Auditory-evoked brainstem responses (ABRs) were used to investigate monaural and binaural lag suppression at the brainstem level. The responses to monaural stimulation reflected the peripheral lag suppression observed in the CEOAE results, while the binaural brainstem responses did not show any substantial contribution of binaural processes to monaural lag suppression. The results demonstrated that the lag suppression occurring at the BM in a time range from 1 to 4 ms, as indicated by the suppression of the lag-CEOAE, was the source of the reduction in the lag-ABRs and a possible peripheral contributor to the PE for click stimuli.

Sound streams were generated by randomly choosing the levels of tone pips from two different distributions, A and B. Of the 18 tone pips, the first nine were drawn from distribution A and the second nine from distribution B, or the opposite. The listeners' task was to indicate order, A-B or B-A. In two conditions the A and B distributions differed in mean (condition 1) or variance (condition 2). In contrast to an ideal observer, listeners' strategies were consistent across the two conditions. Analyses suggest that listeners relied primarily on the more intense tone pips in making their decisions.

The mechanisms by which functional maps and map plasticity contribute to cortical computation remain controversial. Recent studies have revisited the theory of neural Darwinism to interpret the learning-induced map plasticity and neuronal heterogeneity observed in the cortex. Here, we hypothesize that the Darwinian principle provides a substrate to explain the relationship between neuron heterogeneity and cortical functional maps. We demonstrate in the rat auditory cortex that the degree of response variance is closely correlated with the size of its representational area. Further, we show that the response variance within a given population is altered through training. These results suggest that larger representational areas may help to accommodate heterogeneous populations of neurons. Thus, functional maps and map plasticity are likely to play essential roles in Darwinian computation, serving as effective, but not absolutely necessary, structures to generate diverse response properties within a neural population.

In a complex auditory scene, a "cocktail party" for example, listeners can disentangle multiple competing sequences of sounds. A recent psychophysical study in our laboratory demonstrated a robust spatial component of stream segregation showing ∼8° acuity. Here, we recorded single- and multiple-neuron responses from the primary auditory cortex of anesthetized cats while presenting interleaved sound sequences that human listeners would experience as segregated streams. Sequences of broadband sounds alternated between pairs of locations. Neurons synchronized preferentially to sounds from one or the other location, thereby segregating competing sound sequences. Neurons favoring one source location or the other tended to aggregate within the cortex, suggestive of modular organization. The spatial acuity of stream segregation was as narrow as ∼10°, markedly sharper than the broad spatial tuning for single sources that is well known in the literature. Spatial sensitivity was sharpest among neurons having high characteristic frequencies. Neural stream segregation was predicted well by a parameter-free model that incorporated single-source spatial sensitivity and a measured forward-suppression term. We found that the forward suppression was not due to post discharge adaptation in the cortex and, therefore, must have arisen in the subcortical pathway or at the level of thalamocortical synapses. A linear-classifier analysis of single-neuron responses to rhythmic stimuli like those used in our psychophysical study yielded thresholds overlapping those of human listeners. Overall, the results indicate that the ascending auditory system does the work of segregating auditory streams, bringing them to discrete modules in the cortex for selection by top-down processes.

Many natural sounds are periodic and consist of frequencies (harmonics) that are integer multiples of a common fundamental frequency (F0). Such harmonic complex tones (HCTs) evoke a pitch corresponding to their F0, which plays a key role in the perception of speech and music. "Pitch-selective" neurons have been identified in non-primary auditory cortex of marmoset monkeys. Noninvasive studies point to a putative "pitch center" located in a homologous cortical region in humans. It remains unclear whether there is sufficient spectral and temporal information available at the level of primary auditory cortex (A1) to enable reliable pitch extraction in non-primary auditory cortex. Here we evaluated multiunit responses to HCTs in A1 of awake macaques using a stimulus design employed in auditory nerve studies of pitch encoding. The F0 of the HCTs was varied in small increments, such that harmonics of the HCTs fell either on the peak or on the sides of the neuronal pure tone tuning functions. Resultant response-amplitude-versus-harmonic-number functions ("rate-place profiles") displayed a periodic pattern reflecting the neuronal representation of individual HCT harmonics. Consistent with psychoacoustic findings in humans, lower harmonics were better resolved in rate-place profiles than higher harmonics. Lower F0s were also temporally represented by neuronal phase-locking to the periodic waveform of the HCTs. Findings indicate that population responses in A1 contain sufficient spectral and temporal information for extracting the pitch of HCTs by neurons in downstream cortical areas that receive their input from A1.

The neural mechanisms of pitch coding have been debated for more than a century. The two main mechanisms are coding based on the profiles of neural firing rates across auditory nerve fibers with different characteristic frequencies (place-rate coding), and coding based on the phase-locked temporal pattern of neural firing (temporal coding). Phase locking precision can be partly assessed by recording the frequency-following response (FFR), a scalp-recorded electrophysiological response that reflects synchronous activity in subcortical neurons. Although features of the FFR have been widely used as indices of pitch coding acuity, only a handful of studies have directly investigated the relation between the FFR and behavioral pitch judgments. Furthermore, the contribution of degraded neural synchrony (as indexed by the FFR) to the pitch perception impairments of older listeners and those with hearing loss is not well known. Here, the relation between the FFR and pure-tone frequency discrimination was investigated in listeners with a wide range of ages and absolute thresholds, to assess the respective contributions of subcortical neural synchrony and other age-related and hearing loss-related mechanisms to frequency discrimination performance. FFR measures of neural synchrony and absolute thresholds independently contributed to frequency discrimination performance. Age alone, i.e., once the effect of subcortical neural synchrony measures or absolute thresholds had been partialed out, did not contribute to frequency discrimination. Overall, the results suggest that frequency discrimination of pure tones may depend both on phase locking precision and on separate mechanisms affected in hearing loss.

This study tested the hypothesis that the reduced spatial release from speech-on-speech masking typically observed in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss results from increased energetic masking. Target sentences were presented simultaneously with a speech masker, and the spectral overlap between the pair (and hence the energetic masking) was systematically varied. The results are consistent with increased energetic masking in listeners with hearing loss that limits performance when listening in speech mixtures. However, listeners with hearing loss did not exhibit reduced spatial release from masking when stimuli were filtered into narrow bands.

Purpose In this study, the authors aimed to investigate how differences in language ability relate to differences in processing talker information in the native language and an unfamiliar language by comparing performance for different ages and for groups with impaired language. Method Three groups of native English listeners with typical language development (TLD; ages 7–9, ages 10–12, adults) and 2 groups with specific language impairment (SLI; ages 7–9, ages 10–12) participated in the study. Listeners heard pairs of words in both English and German (unfamiliar language) and were asked to determine whether the words were produced by the same or different talkers. Results In English, talker discrimination improved with age. In German, performance improved with age for the school-age children but was worse for adult listeners. No differences were found between TLD and SLI children. Conclusion These results show that as listeners' language skills develop, there is a trade-off between more general perceptual abilities useful for processing talker information in any language and those that are relevant to their everyday language experiences and, thus, tied to the phonology. The lack of differences between the children with and without language impairments suggests that general auditory processing may be intact in at least some children with SLI.