A Comparison of Behavioral Methods for Indexing the Auditory Processing of Temporal Fine Structure Cues

Abstract

Purpose Growing evidence supports the inclusion of perceptual tests that quantify the processing of temporal fine structure (TFS) in clinical hearing assessment. Many tasks have been used to evaluate TFS in the laboratory that vary greatly in the stimuli used and whether the judgments require monaural or binaural comparisons of TFS. The purpose of this study was to compare laboratory measures of TFS for inclusion in a battery of suprathreshold auditory tests. A subset of available TFS tasks were selected on the basis of potential clinical utility and were evaluated using metrics that focus on characteristics important for clinical use. Method TFS measures were implemented in replication of studies that demonstrated clinical utility. Monaural, diotic, and dichotic measures were evaluated in 11 young listeners with normal hearing. Measures included frequency modulation (FM) tasks, harmonic frequency shift detection, interaural phase difference (TFS–low frequency), interaural time difference (ITD), monaural gap duration discrimination, and tone detection in noise with and without a difference in interaural phase (N 0 S 0 , N 0 S π ). Data were compared with published results and evaluated with metrics of consistency and efficiency. Results Thresholds obtained were consistent with published data. There was no evidence of predictive relationships among the measures consistent with a homogenous group. The most stable tasks across repeated testing were TFS–low frequency, diotic and dichotic FM, and N 0 S π . Monaural and diotic FM had the lowest normalized variance and were the most efficient accounting for differences in total test duration, followed by ITD. Conclusions Despite a long stimulus duration, FM tasks dominated comparisons of consistency and efficiency. Small differences separated the dichotic tasks FM, ITD, and N 0 S π . Future comparisons following procedural optimization of the tasks will evaluate clinical efficiency in populations with impairment.

Age-Related Deficits in Electrophysiological and Behavioral Measures of Binaural Temporal Processing

“…Diotic and dichotic FM detection thresholds were measured using a four-interval, two-cue, two-alternative forced choice procedure (Hoover et al, 2019;Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al, 2020). Each standard stimulus was an unmodulated pure tone and the target stimulus was a pure tone carrier with a 6.8-Hz sinusoidal modulator that was presented in either the 2nd or 3rd stimulus interval on a touchscreen iPad display.…”

“…Many common behavioral tests of binaural temporal processing tend to require extensive training periods on the part of the examiner and the listener as well as a high number of stimulus repetitions to obtain reliable estimates of binaural sensitivity (Stecker and Gallun, 2012). These issues have motivated recent research efforts that focus on new implementations of existing laboratory tests which would not require extensive resources, time, or training on the part of the experimenter or participant (Gallun et al, 2013;Moore, 2017, 2018;Jakien et al, 2017;Jakien and Gallun, 2018;Hoover et al, 2019;Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al, 2020). Hoover et al (2019) recently adapted a dichotic frequency modulation (FM) detection task that uses a frequency modulated signal that is inverted in phase at one ear relative to the other to create IPD cues (Grose and Mamo, 2012b;Whiteford et al, 2015).…”

“…These issues have motivated recent research efforts that focus on new implementations of existing laboratory tests which would not require extensive resources, time, or training on the part of the experimenter or participant (Gallun et al, 2013;Moore, 2017, 2018;Jakien et al, 2017;Jakien and Gallun, 2018;Hoover et al, 2019;Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al, 2020). Hoover et al (2019) recently adapted a dichotic frequency modulation (FM) detection task that uses a frequency modulated signal that is inverted in phase at one ear relative to the other to create IPD cues (Grose and Mamo, 2012b;Whiteford et al, 2015). Performance on this task has been shown to be impacted by age, such that older listeners tend to have higher dichotic FM detection thresholds than younger-and middle-aged listeners, reflecting potential agerelated declines in temporal fine structure processing (Grose and Mamo, 2012b) or central binaural integration processes (Whiteford et al, 2017).…”

“…Performance on this task has been shown to be impacted by age, such that older listeners tend to have higher dichotic FM detection thresholds than younger-and middle-aged listeners, reflecting potential agerelated declines in temporal fine structure processing (Grose and Mamo, 2012b) or central binaural integration processes (Whiteford et al, 2017). Hoover et al (2019) showed that, compared to other behavioral tests designed to assess temporal fine structure processing, the FM detection tasks were among the most consistent and efficient measures of binaural processing in a group of young, normal-hearing participants. Several studies have also established the use of a measure of spatial release from masking using speech stimuli for the assessment of binaural function (Gallun et al, 2013;Jakien et al, 2017;Jakien and Gallun, 2018).…”

Temporal integration of monaural and dichotic frequency modulation

“…Although it has been shown that FM detection is dependent on certain stimulus characteristics, such as modulation frequency (Green et al, 1976;Hartmann and Klein, 1980;Moore and Sek, 1995;Moore and Skrodzka, 2002;Ernst and Moore, 2012;Whiteford and Oxenham, 2015;Wallaert et al, 2018), carrier frequency (Moore and Sek, 1995;Moore and Skrodzka, 2002;He et al, 2007;Ernst and Moore, 2012) and the combination of duration and number of modulation cycles (Hartmann and Klein, 1980;Grose and Mamo, 2012;Wallaert et al, 2018;Hoover et al 2019), there are still many questions remaining regarding the stimulus parameters that impact FM detection and the physiological mechanisms by which dynamic changes in frequency are encoded by the auditory system. In addition, there is good reason to believe that dichotic FM stimuli, such as those used by Green et al (1976), are detected by fundamentally different mechanisms than are used to detect monaural or diotic FM, at least for rates below 40 Hz.…”