Hearing-impaired sound perception: What can we learn from a biophysical model of the human auditory periphery?

Abstract

Auditory modelling provides a powerful quantitative framework to study performance in psychoacoustic listening tasks such as signal or modulation detection, and speech perception. Biophysically-inspired auditory models provide the straightforward possibility to account for different aspects of sensorineural hearing loss (e.g., hair cell loss or synaptopathy) and are well suited to study the origin of individual performance differences on behavioural tasks. Here, we simulated how detection thresholds to low- and high-frequency supra-threshold stimuli changed for various profiles of sensorineural hearing loss: (1) normal or high-frequency sloping audio- grams (>1 kHz, 30 dB HL at 8 kHz), and (2) normal or gradual loss of auditory-nerve synapses. The tasks included the detection of amplitude-modulated tones at carrier frequencies of 500 Hz (fmod=5 Hz) and 4 kHz (fmod=100 Hz) presented with or without background noise. The simulations were compared with experimental data collected from listeners with normal or high-frequency sloping audiograms. The simulations accounted for up to 8.6 dB of the experimental variability, where the simulated variability was derived from the maximum shift between simulated thresholds in each condition