Binaural jitter improves interaural time-difference sensitivity of cochlear implantees at high pulse rates

Interaural time difference (ITD) arises whenever a sound outside of the median plane arrives at the two ears. There is evidence that ITD in the rapidly varying fine structure of a sound is most important for sound localization and for understanding speech in noise. Cochlear implants (CIs), neural prosthetic devices that restore hearing in the profoundly deaf, are increasingly implanted to both ears to provide implantees with the advantages of binaural hearing. CI listeners have been shown to be sensitive to fine structure ITD at low pulse rates, but their sensitivity declines at higher pulse rates that are required for speech coding. We hypothesize that this limitation in electric stimulation is at least partially due to binaural adaptation associated with periodic stimulation. Here, we show that introducing binaurally synchronized jitter in the stimulation timing causes large improvements in ITD sensitivity at higher pulse rates. Our experimental results demonstrate that a purely temporal trigger can cause recovery from binaural adaptation. Thus, binaurally jittered stimulation may improve several aspects of binaural hearing in bilateral recipients of neural auditory prostheses.