Sensorineural hearing loss degrades behavioral and physiological measures of human spatial selective auditory attention.

ABSTRACT: Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss often have trouble understanding speech amid other voices. While poor spatial hearing is often implicated, direct evidence is weak; moreover, studies suggest that reduced audibility and degraded spectrotemporal coding may explain such problems. We hypothesized that poor spatial acuity leads to difficulty deploying selective attention, which normally filters out distracting sounds. In listeners with normal hearing, selective attention causes changes in the neural responses evoked by competing sounds, which can be used to quantify the effectiveness of attentional control. Here, we used behavior and electroencephalography to explore whether control of selective auditory attention is degraded in hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. Normal-hearing (NH) and

SUBMITTER: Dai L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5889663 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature