Changes in the integration of self motion and auditory spatial cues with age, hearing impairment, and use of hearing devices

Abstract

To resolve a front/back confusion, listeners may use both the spectral cues associated with the pinnae and they may turn their heads and note the direction in which the signal moves. Since hearing impairment typically involves the loss of high frequency information, one might expect that hearing impaired listeners would be more reliant on self-motion cues. Such listeners, however, often wear hearing aids that alter binaural level cues, suggesting they may distort dynamic self-motion-related cues. To examine these interactions, we utilized a previously published front/back illusion [W.O. Brimijoin and M.A. Akeroyd, iPercept. 3(3), 179–182 (2012)]: the perceptual location of signals whose position is moved at twice the angular rate of head movements is opposite to its physical location. In normal-hearing listeners, the illusion is powerful but weakens with increasing low-pass filter cutoff frequency. We found that for hearing-impaired listeners, the illusion was effective at all cutoff frequencies. The effect of hearing aids was heterogeneous across listeners, but in no case was a listener returned to normal performance, suggesting that hearing aids are not only failing to provide the listener with spatially-informative spectral cues, but they may interfere with self-motion-related cues. [Work supported by MRC (U135097131) and the Chief Scientist Office (Scotland).]