ePoster

Does spatial hearing with bionic ears change with jittered binaural stimuli?

Tim Fleiner, Emily Becker, Susan Arndt, Jan W. Schnupp, Nicole Rosskothen-Kuhl
FENS Forum 2024(2024)
Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna, Austria

Conference

FENS Forum 2024

Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna, Austria

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Tim Fleiner, Emily Becker, Susan Arndt, Jan W. Schnupp, Nicole Rosskothen-Kuhl

Abstract

Early deafened patients with bilateral cochlear implants (biCI) often show impaired spatial hearing, particularly due to reduced sensitivity to interaural time differences (ITDs). Recent research of our groups has shown that neonatally deafened rats, supplied with biCI in young adulthood, can effectively learn to use ITDs for sound localization if the animals received informative pulse timing (pt) ITDs from the onset of stimulation. Here we investigate whether the hearing-inexperienced auditory system can develop good ITD sensitivity when ptITDs are jittered from onset of electric stimulation.Neonatally deafened rats were supplied with biCI in young adulthood and trained to lateralize pulse trains with jittered ptITDs. ITDs were drawn independently from ±{20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120} μs. Jitter values changed per pulse and were randomly drawn from a distribution ranging between ±60 μs. After 5 weeks of training, rats were tested on ITD sensitivity with and without jitter on the ptITD of each pulse.Under jittered stimulation conditions, all rats with bionic ears showed very good ITD sensitivities. After removal of the jitter, rats still showed good ITD perception albeit with a trend toward reduced sensitivity. The results suggest that ITD sensitivity of the early-deafened auditory system is not impaired when exposed to jittered pt information during initial training. ITD sensitivity appeared to be comparable under jittered versus unjittered stimulation conditions, suggesting that the development of good spatial hearing in patients with bionic ears is dependent on informative but not microsecond precise ptITDs.

Unique ID: fens-24/does-spatial-hearing-with-bionic-ears-6ebfb111