title: Individual differences reveal correlates of hidden hearing deficits.
abstract: Clinical audiometry has long focused on determining the detection thresholds for pure tones, which depend on intact cochlear mechanics and hair cell function. Yet many listeners with normal hearing thresholds complain of communication difficulties, and the causes for such problems are not well understood. Here, we explore whether normal-hearing listeners exhibit such suprathreshold deficits, affecting the fidelity with which subcortical areas encode the temporal structure of clearly audible sound. Using an array of measures, we evaluated a cohort of young adults with thresholds in the normal range to assess both cochlear mechanical function and temporal coding of suprathreshold sounds. Listeners differed widely in both electrophysiological and behavioral measures of temporal coding fidelity. These measures correlated significantly with each other. Conversely, these differences were unrelated to the modest variation in otoacoustic emissions, cochlear tuning, or the residual differences in hearing threshold present in our cohort. Electroencephalography revealed that listeners with poor subcortical encoding had poor cortical sensitivity to changes in interaural time differences, which are critical for localizing sound sources and analyzing complex scenes. These listeners also performed poorly when asked to direct selective attention to one of two competing speech streams, a task that mimics the challenges of many everyday listening environments. Together with previous animal and computational models, our results suggest that hidden hearing deficits, likely originating at the level of the cochlear nerve, are part of "normal hearing."
authors: Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, hari@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu.
authors: Hari M
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8685-9630
authors: HM
authors: Bharadwaj
authors: Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
authors: Salwa
authors: S
authors: Masud
authors: Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology and Program in Speech and Hearing Biosciences and Technology, Harvard University-Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, and.
authors: Golbarg
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0389-8632
authors: G
authors: Mehraei
authors: Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology and Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all and Medizinische Physik, Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics, Oldenburg University, D-26111 Oldenburg, Germany.
authors: Sarah
authors: S
authors: Verhulst
authors: Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
authors: Barbara G
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5096-5914
authors: BG
authors: Shinn-Cunningham
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003051:Cochlea / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: central auditory processing disorders; cochlear neuropathy; envelope-following response; frequency-following response; hidden hearing loss; temporal coding
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