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Related Concept Videos

Perception of Sound Waves

Perception of Sound Waves

The human ear is not equally sensitive to all frequencies in the audible range. It may perceive sound waves with the same pressure but different frequencies as having different loudness. Moreover, the perception of sound waves depends on the health of an individual's ears, which decays with age. The health of one's ears may also be affected by regular exposure to loud noises.
The pitch of a sound depends on the frequency and the pressure amplitude of the source. Two sounds of the same frequency...

Sound Intensity Level

Sound Intensity Level

Humans perceive sound by hearing. The human ear helps sound waves reach the brain, which then interprets the waves and creates the perception of hearing. The loudness of the environment in which a person is located determines whether they can distinguish between different sound sources.
The human ear can perceive an extensive range of sound intensity, necessitating the use of the logarithmic scale to define a physical quantity—the intensity level. It is a ratio of two intensities and hence a...

Hearing

Hearing

When we hear a sound, our nervous system is detecting sound waves—pressure waves of mechanical energy traveling through a medium. The frequency of the wave is perceived as pitch, while the amplitude is perceived as loudness.

The Cochlea

The Cochlea

The cochlea is a coiled structure in the inner ear that contains hair cells—the sensory receptors of the auditory system. Sound waves are transmitted to the cochlea by small bones attached to the eardrum called the ossicles, which vibrate the oval window that leads to the inner ear. This causes fluid in the chambers of the cochlea to move, vibrating the basilar membrane.

Echo

Echo

The human ear cannot distinguish between two sources of sound if they happen to reach within a specific time interval, typically 0.1 seconds apart. More than this, and they are perceived as separate sources.
Imagine the sound is reflected back to the ears. Assuming that the source is very close to the human, the difference between hearing the two sounds—the emitted sound and the reflected sound—may be more than the minimum time for perceiving distinct sounds. If this is the case, then the...

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Related Experiment Video

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Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses

Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses

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Apparent auditory source width insensitivity in older hearing-impaired individuals.

William M Whitmer¹, Bernhard U Seeber, Michael A Akeroyd

¹MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Scottish Section, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Glasgow G31 2ER, United Kingdom. bill@ihr.gla.ac.uk

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|July 12, 2012

Summary

Older hearing-impaired adults struggle to distinguish sound source width, indicating difficulties with auditory spatial perception and potentially poorer neural representations of sound location.

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Area of Science:

Auditory Neuroscience
Psychoacoustics
Gerontology

Background:

Older hearing-impaired (HI) individuals exhibit reduced precision in horizontal localization.
Deficits may stem from difficulties discriminating spatial images and insensitivity to punctate sound sources.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if older HI individuals have impaired discrimination of interaural coherence (IC).
To determine if age and hearing loss affect the perception of auditory source width.

Main Methods:

Three headphone-presentation experiments were conducted, varying IC.
Participants discriminated IC differences and completed visual tasks (drawing sound size, identifying corresponding images).
Experiments involved younger normal-hearing and older HI participants, with some matched for hearing loss.

Main Results:

Older HI participants were significantly worse at discriminating IC compared to younger normal-hearing individuals.
Performance in IC discrimination decreased with age.
Visual tasks revealed older HI individuals do not perceive punctate sound images and are insensitive to IC-based width changes.

Conclusions:

Older HI individuals exhibit deficits in discriminating auditory source width, particularly related to interaural coherence.
These findings suggest age-related hearing impairment impacts the perception of auditory spatial attributes.
The results support the hypothesis that difficulties in discriminating spatial images contribute to poorer auditory localization in older HI adults.