Measurement and analysis of perceptual coding in the human auditory system: Multi-modal studies using neural activation patterns

Abstract

A framework is presented for measuring perceptual differences among auditory scenarios and for producing target perceptual effects in auditory experiments. Auditory scenarios are specific configurations of auditory sub-systems, including both hearing loss due to physiological impairment and/or augmentation via a prosthetic device (e.g., the cochlear implant). The framework is developed around comparisons between scenarios at the level of the auditory nerve, which encapsulates the effects of many forms of hearing loss and device augmentations (e.g., the cochlear implant stimulates the auditory nerve directly from within the cochlea). At the auditory nerve, neural activation is viewed as a pattern in both space (the distance along the cochlea) and time. These patterns are generated by forward models that represent the acoustic pathways for various scenarios leading to the auditory nerve. Thus, a neural activation pattern completely encodes an auditory input and a specific auditory scenario. After generating two such patterns, the framework applies a special transformation and then computes the perceptual difference with a special measurement. The transformation and measurement are both developed within this framework for mapping unit perceptual differences to measurable unit distances. Two forward models are also developed within this work and presented for specialized use alongside a growing body of modeling work. Using the framework, results are presented that demonstrate potential shortcomings in current acoustic representations of the cochlear implant for normal-hearing subjects

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