Sound lateralization and cognitive performance

• Introduction. Spatial hearing outcome of hearing aid fitting might benefit from further knowledge of sound lateralization. Effects from signal processing and cognitive speed on sound lateralization performance have been examined in this study.Method. Sound lateralization performance and cognitive performance were measured in adult participants. They assessed direction of noise pulses presented through earphones. Direction was simulated with interaural level differences with and without interaural time differences. Dynamic compression was set to bypass, independent channels, or linked left and right channels. Cognitive performance was assessed by means of letter matching, lexical or phonological tasks. The mean response time and the number of correct responses were recorded for each test condition. For the lateralization task, two-way fixed-effects ANOVA for repeated measurements were performed. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated between the lateralization tasks and the cognitive tasks.Results. For sound lateralization accuracy, presence of interaural time differences improved performance. Independent channels dynamic compression reduced lateralization accuracy. For sound lateralization, presence of interaural time differences improved the response time by 145 ms and the response accuracy by 9.5 %-units. Dynamic compression with separate sides level detection worsened the response accuracy by 14 %-units compared to bypassed or common level detector compression. The response time for the lateralization tasks correlated more to the letter matching task (Pearson r = 0.7) than the other cognitive tasks (Pearson r ≤ 0.5).

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Handikappvetenskap

Disability Science

MEDICINE

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