Topic: bilateral cochlear implants

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.

Bilateral cochlear implants (biCIs) are increasingly used to treat severe hearing loss. However, human biCI users usually exhibit relatively poor binaural cue sensitivity, with interaural time difference (ITD) sensitivity in prelingually deaf patients being particularly poor. To better understand these shortcomings in prosthetic binaural hearing, it would be helpful to know what the “innate” ITD and ILD sensitivity of the neonatally deafened (ND), mature mammalian auditory pathway is like, but this cannot easily be investigated in humans. We therefore recorded neural responses in the inferior

Spatial hearing, as a fundamental aspect of auditory perception, plays a central role in our daily interactions with the auditory environment. The ability to localize sound and navigate through our environment relies primarily on two binaural cues: interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs). However, for patients with bilateral cochlear implants (biCI), sound localization is a major challenge and ITD sensitivity is particularly poor, with most biCI patients relying almost exclusively on ILDs. Nevertheless, our recent work demonstrates that neonatally deafened ra