Auditory Motion Perception by Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users With a Sound Coding Strategy that Synchronizes Peak-Picking Across the Ears.
Stephen R Dennison, Lingkai Harry Zhao, Alan Kan and 1 others
Synchronized cochlear implant hardware improved how accurately users judged the range of a moving sound, but the new bilateral peak-picking strategy added nothing over standard processing on the same hardware.
Motion discrimination and start-location accuracy were unchanged across all three conditions.
Key findings
1No strategy improved the ability to tell whether a sound was moving or stationary; group sensitivity was 0.63 (above chance) but did not differ across clinical, ACE, or BACE conditions.
2Range-of-motion error was significantly smaller with both CCi-MOBILE conditions (19.4° ACE, 19.2° BACE) than with clinical processors (22.6°), but ACE and BACE did not differ from each other.
3Start-location accuracy was similar across all three conditions (27° ACE, 29° BACE, 29° Clinical), with no significant strategy effect.
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How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Only 9 participants, all tested in a single session of about 6 hours; no take-home listening period to allow acclimation to the new strategies. AGC was active on clinical processors but not on the CCi-MOBILE, so the range-of-motion difference may partly reflect AGC rather than synchronization. Participants knew when they were using clinical processors versus the research processor (they had to physically switch), so condition awareness was not fully controlled. The BACE strategy was only tested for a few hours; longer use might change performance. One participant's data was excluded from some analyses due to an experimenter error in trial allocation.
Declared interests
Funded by NIH-NIDCD grants (R01DC016839, R01DC03083, R01DC020355) and a Waisman Center core grant (U54 HD090256). One author (SRD) was a salaried employee of MED-EL US at the time of submission (not when the work was complete). Another author (AK) is a Cochlear shareholder. Clinical processors were Cochlear N6 units loaned by the manufacturer.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the range-of-motion improvement as evidence that the bilateral peak-picking strategy (BACE) is the active ingredient — BACE and standard ACE on the same synchronized hardware performed identically (0.25° difference, p = 0.98). The benefit came from the synchronized hardware itself, not from coordinating which channels fire in each ear. Additionally, AGC was off on the research processor but on for clinical units, so part of the difference may be an AGC artifact rather than a synchronization effect.
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