title: Individual Differences in Behavioural Decision Weights Related to Irregularities in Cochlear Mechanics.
abstract: An unexpected finding of previous psychophysical studies is that listeners show highly replicable, individualistic patterns of decision weights on frequencies affecting their performance in spectral discrimination tasks--what has been referred to as individual listening styles. We, like many other researchers, have attributed these listening styles to peculiarities in how listeners attend to sounds, but we now believe they partially reflect irregularities in cochlear micromechanics modifying what listeners hear. The most striking evidence for cochlear irregularities is the presence of low-level spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs) measured in the ear canal and the systematic variation in stimulus frequency otoacoustic emissions (SFOAEs), both of which result from back-propagation of waves in the cochlea. SOAEs and SFOAEs vary greatly across individual ears and have been shown to affect behavioural thresholds, behavioural frequency selectivity and judged loudness for tones. The present paper reports pilot data providing evidence that SOAEs and SFOAEs are also predictive of the relative decision weight listeners give to a pair of tones in a level discrimination task. In one condition the frequency of one tone was selected to be near that of an SOAE and the frequency of the other was selected to be in a frequency region for which there was no detectable SOAE. In a second condition the frequency of one tone was selected to correspond to an SFOAE maximum, the frequency of the other tone, an SFOAE minimum. In both conditions a statistically significant correlation was found between the average relative decision weight on the two tones and the difference in OAE levels.
authors.affiliation: Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 53706, Madison, WI, USA. Jungmee.lee@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Jungmee
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 53706, Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Inseok
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Heo
authors.affiliation: Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 53706, Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: An-Chieh
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 53706, Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Kristen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bond
authors.affiliation: Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 53706, Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Christophe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stoelinga
authors.affiliation: Auditory Behavioral Research Laboratory, Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 53706, Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lutfi
authors.affiliation: Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, Graduate Center of City University of New York, 10016, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Glenis
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Long
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D003051:Cochlea / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D017084:Otoacoustic Emissions, Spontaneous
keywords: Behavioural decision weights; Level discrimination; Spontaneous otoacoustic emissions; Stimulus frequency otoacoustic emission