Cortical oscillatory signatures of active listening complement brainstem coding measures in predicting listening performance

Abstract

Following the finding of cochlear deafferentation (“synaptopathy”) in noise exposure and aging in animal models (Kujawa and Liberman, J. Neurosci. 2009; Sergeyenko et al., J. Neurosci. 2013), there is considerable interest among hearing scientists and clinicians to investigate the presence and consequences of synaptopathy in humans. In the laboratory, human subjects with clinically normal hearing (NH) listeners from the general population exhibit large individual differences in suprathreshold perceptual ability. Through a recent series of experiments using otoacoustic emissions and electrophysiology, we studied these individual differences and showed that they partly arise from differences in subcortical coding of temporal information consistent with synaptopathy (Bharadwaj et al., J. Neurosci. 2015). In the current study, we examined cortical oscillations accompanying cued preparation to selectively attend to a target spatial location as a correlate of top-down active listening. We find that both brainst...