• Astudillo, Juan Pablo Faundez

Abstract

Binaural hearing is essential to everyday listening. Humans use interaural timing differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs) between the two ears to localise sounds and understand speech in noise. To assess binaural processing objectively, several electrophysiological methods based on electroencephalography (EEG) have been developed, as there is a need for objective measures of ITD processing in difficult to test population such as children since psychoacoustic tasks are hard to conduct. Some of the proposed objective neural techniques include the ‘acoustic change complex’ to changes in ITD (ACC, Ross et al., 2007) and the ‘interaural phase modulation – following response’ (IPM-FR, Haywood, et al., 2015: McAlpine et al., 2016; Undurraga et al., 2016). Both are neural measures of ITD processing that have been validated and recorded successfully in adults, but have not yet been recorded in paediatric population. We propose to assess ITD processing in normal-hearing adult population by means of objective measures based on EEG recordings: ACC to changes in ITD and IPM-FR; including some modifications compared to previous experimental data to assure the feasibility and reliability of these recordings in future paediatric testings. The aim of this study is to determine the influence of slight asymmetries - as in young children clinical audiological tests do not always provide exact hearing thresholds – and of arousal state on these measurements in normal hearing adults, to conduct these experiments in paediatric population in the near future.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• phase
• experiment