Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) for auditory assessment: Validation in a young adult normal-hearing population

Abstract

This study aims to determine the degree to which Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART), a freely available program running on a tablet computer, is capable of reproducing standard laboratory results. Undergraduate students were assigned to one of three within-subject conditions that examined repeatability of performance on a battery of psychoacoustical tests of temporal fine structure processing, spectro-temporal amplitude modulation, and targets in competition. The repeatability condition examined test/retest with the same system, the headphones condition examined the effects of varying headphones (passive and active noise-attenuating), and the noise condition examined repeatability in the presence of recorded cafeteria noise. In general, performance on the test battery showed high repeatability, even across manipulated conditions, and was similar to that reported in the literature. These data serve as validation that suprathreshold psychoacoustical tests can be made accessible to run on consumer-grade hardware and perform in less controlled settings. This dataset also provides a distribution of thresholds that can be used as a normative baseline against which auditory dysfunction can be identified in future work.

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.…”

“…Randomizing the carrier frequency in this way lessens the possibility that participants use a place cue to detect the frequency modulated target stimulus from the unmodulated pure-tone standard stimuli. All stimuli had inter-stimulus intervals of 250 ms. Modulation depth was adaptively varied in logarithmic steps using the algorithm described in Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al (2020). This staircase procedure estimates the lowest rate, in Hz, at which a given individual can just detect the frequency modulation.…”

“…Studies have shown that older listeners tend to receive less benefit from the spatial separation of target and background speech streams compared to younger listeners (Gallun et al, 2013;Jakien et al, 2017;Jakien and Gallun, 2018). Spatial release-from-masking thresholds appear to be consistent across different modes of testing, including testing under headphones in a virtual space using traditional laboratory equipment (Jakien et al, 2017) as well as a tablet-based automated rapid-testing version of the task recently developed in the Portable Automated Rapid Testing application (PART; Gallun et al, 2018;Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al, 2020). Taken together, evidence from these previous studies suggests that measures of binaural FM sensitivity and spatial release from masking may represent efficient and reliable testing tools that are sensitive to age-related changes in binaural function, which motivated their selection for use in the current study.…”

“…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).…”

Training with an auditory perceptual learning game transfers to speech in competition

“…While, restoring audibility through amplification may help in some cases, it does not necessarily resolve problems with central auditory processing (CAP) Hoover, Souza & Gallun, 2017;Humes et al, 2019), and amplification comes with its own difficulties in noisy environments since both the sound of interest and the competing noise are amplified (see McDermott, 2009). As such, there exists a significant need for assessment and rehabilitation of supra-threshold auditory processing disabilities Weihing, Chermak & Musiek, 2015;Gallun et al, 2018;Larrea-Mancera et al, 2020), which relate to our capacity to discriminate between competing sounds to resolve what we intend to hear.…”