Modeling the Test-Retest Statistics of a Localization Experiment in the Full Horizontal Plane

Two approaches to model the test-retest statistics of a localization experiment basing on Gaussian distribution and on surrogate data are introduced. Their efficiency is investigated using different measures describing directional hearing ability.

A localization experiment in the full horizontal plane is a challenging task for hearing impaired patients. In clinical routine, we use this experiment to evaluate the progress of our cochlear implant (CI) recipients. Listening and time effort limit the reproducibility.

The localization experiment consists of a 12 loudspeaker circle, placed in an anechoic room, a "camera silens". In darkness, HSM sentences are presented at 65 dB pseudo-erratically from all 12 directions with five repetitions. This experiment is modeled by a set of Gaussian distributions with different standard deviations added to a perfect estimator, as well as by surrogate data. Five repetitions per direction are used to produce surrogate data distributions for the sensation directions. To investigate the statistics, we retrospectively use the data of 33 CI patients with 92 pairs of test-retest-measurements from the same day.

The first model does not take inversions into account, (i.e., permutations of the direction from back to front and vice versa are not considered), although they are common for hearing impaired persons particularly in the rear hemisphere. The second model considers these inversions but does not work with all measures.

The introduced models successfully describe test-retest statistics of directional hearing. However, since their applications on the investigated measures perform differently no general recommendation can be provided. The presented test-retest statistics enable pair test comparisons for localization experiments.