Abstract
PurposeGrowing 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.MethodTFS 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 (N0S0, N0Sπ). Data were compared with published results and evaluated with metrics of consistency and efficiency.ResultsThresholds 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 N0Sπ. Monaural and diotic FM had the lowest normalized variance and were the most efficient accounting for differences in total test duration, followed by ITD.ConclusionsDespite a long stimulus duration, FM tasks dominated comparisons of consistency and efficiency. Small differences separated the dichotic tasks FM, ITD, and N0Sπ. Future comparisons following procedural optimization of the tasks will evaluate clinical efficiency in populations with impairment.
Highlights
The primary conclusions of this study are that FM-M is the best among the indices of monaural TFS and that several dichotic tasks remain excellent candidate indices of binaural TFS
ITD with Gaussian envelope tone pips was the most efficient measure among the dichotic tasks but showed a familiarization effect in the change in threshold from initial to final estimate that would not be ideal for a rapid test protocol
FM/FM was less efficient than ITD and N0Sπ, but performance was as good on the initial track as in the final estimate
Summary
The purpose of this study was to compare laboratory measures of TFS for inclusion in a battery of suprathreshold auditory tests. The goal of the current study was to evaluate a set of measures that are candidates for inclusion in an efficient clinical protocol that includes the evaluation of TFS processing among a number of other auditory perceptual abilities
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