Sensitivity to Angular and Radial Source Movements as a Function of Acoustic Complexity in Normal and Impaired Hearing.
Micha Lundbeck, Giso Grimm, Volker Hohmann and 2 others
PMID 28675088WHAT IT FOUND
Older listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were poor at detecting sounds moving left-right or away in complex scenes.
Reverberation especially worsened detection of sounds moving away. Young normal-hearing listeners stayed accurate. This is a lab finding, not a tested treatment.
Key findings
01Elderly hearing-impaired listeners needed larger angular displacements to detect left-right movement than young normal-hearing listeners, and more concurrent sound sources made this harder.
02Reverberation did not significantly affect angular movement detection, but it strongly reduced near-far movement detection in elderly hearing-impaired listeners.
03For near-far movement, young normal-hearing listeners detected movements of about 1 m or less, while a few elderly hearing-impaired listeners needed movements greater than 5 m, especially under reverberation.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small: 10 young normal-hearing and 15 elderly hearing-impaired listeners. The hearing-impaired group was older, so age and hearing loss were confounded. The test was a laboratory headphone simulation, not real-world listening. Participants knew the movement type in advance, and only one simulated room was used. Some elderly hearing-impaired thresholds were excluded because the target could not be heard out or the listener could not distinguish static from moving sounds. Near-far test-retest measurements were not correlated for the young normal-hearing group, although the absolute difference was only 0.06 m.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not include a conflicts of interest or funding declaration. The journal metadata lists research support from a non-U.S. government source.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these thresholds as evidence that hearing aids, therapy, or environmental changes improve spatial hearing. This study measured detection thresholds in a laboratory simulation and did not test treatment.