Best cochlear locations for delivering interaural timing cues in electric hearing
Agudemu Borjigin1,2, Stephen R Dennison3, Tanvi Thakkar4
1University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. agudemu.borjigin@hsc.utah.edu.
Communications Medicine
|March 11, 2026
Summary
Bilateral cochlear implants improve interaural time difference (ITD) perception for tones but not speech. Targeting a single "best" cochlear location is insufficient for complex sounds like speech.
Area of Science:
- Audiology
- Neuroscience
- Biomedical Engineering
Background:
- Bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) offer potential for binaural hearing but struggle to restore sound localization cues.
- Interaural time differences (ITDs), crucial for low-frequency sound localization, are not adequately restored by current BiCI technology.
- Electrical stimulation of the cochlea may not align with natural ITD processing, necessitating optimized strategies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if targeting a personalized "best" cochlear location can improve interaural time difference (ITD) perception in bilateral cochlear implant (BiCI) users.
- To compare the effectiveness of a personalized "Best" strategy against control strategies for spatial hearing with BiCIs.
Main Methods:
- Developed a personalized sound-coding strategy delivering ITDs to each participant's optimal cochlear location.
- Evaluated spatial hearing in 14 BiCI users using the personalized
- Best
- strategy and three control strategies.
Main Results:
- The personalized
- Best
- strategy significantly improved ITD perception for pure tone stimuli.
- This improvement in ITD perception did not extend to complex speech stimuli.
Conclusions:
- Targeting a single optimal cochlear location enhances ITD perception for simple sounds.
- Restoring robust ITD sensitivity for complex sounds like speech may require stimulating multiple cochlear locations to ensure redundancy.
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