Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book Sound Localization Training with Audio-visual Integration in Sub-optimal Listening Environments written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cochlear implant (CI) users are outperformed by normal hearing (NH) listeners when localizing sound sources in space [1-3]. This may result from inaccurate representation of auditory space, due to lack of experience in integrating auditory cues that are unreliable with visual cues that are highly reliable and well-mapped in the spatial dimension. A training method was designed in order to assess whether sound localization performance could be improved, by reinforcing salient localization cues over degraded localization cues. This training method is hypothesized to allow the listener to weight the former more heavily than the latter. This approach was developed and tested by training 23 NH adults, in two sub-optimal listening environments with conflicting auditory cues. The audio-visual integration training (AVIT) method relies on a visual stimulus that coincides with the sound's location, serving to reinforce a more fine-tuned auditory spatial map by allowing the listener to optimally weight the available auditory cues. In the first experiment, the sub-optimal listening environment was echoic; listeners were trained to weight the auditory cues associated with the first-arriving soundwave more heavily than the later-arriving soundwave. In the second experiment, vocoded stimuli were used to induce a sub-optimal listening situation, in which CI processing is modeled and used to simulate realistic conditions experienced by CI users. NH listeners were trained to weight relatively intact interaural level difference cues more heavily than other cues that were degraded by the vocoding process. AVIT was shown to produce improvement in sound localization ability in the first experiment, suggesting that degradation of spatial cues by echoes can be overcome with audio-visual integration, whereas, degradation of spatial cues with CI processing is more challenging to overcome.