Abstract
Despite over 100 years of study, there are still many fundamental questions about binaural hearing that remain unanswered, including how impairments of binaural function are related to the mechanisms of binaural hearing. This review focuses on a number of studies that are fundamental to understanding what is known about the effects of peripheral hearing loss, aging, traumatic brain injury, strokes, brain tumors, and multiple sclerosis (MS) on binaural function. The literature reviewed makes clear that while each of these conditions has the potential to impair the binaural system, the specific abilities of a given patient cannot be known without performing multiple behavioral and/or neurophysiological measurements of binaural sensitivity. Future work in this area has the potential to bring awareness of binaural dysfunction to patients and clinicians as well as a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of binaural hearing, but it will require the integration of clinical research with animal and computational modeling approaches.
Highlights
The ability to process the information available in pressure waves arriving at the two ears (“binaural hearing”) is available to living creatures ranging from insects (Hedwig and Stumpner, 2016) to humans
These results suggest that while there is significant variance unaccounted for by the pure-tone detection thresholds, perhaps some of the equivocal results of earlier work were due to insufficiently large sample sizes or insufficient model complexity
From the data presented in sections “Peripheral Loss and Binaural Sensitivity to Interaural Differences” and “Peripheral Loss and spatial release from masking (SRM),” it is clear that at least some listeners with poorer pure-tone detection thresholds are impaired on tasks requiring good temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, especially for narrowband stimuli and those in which the ITD is not present in the temporal envelope structure (TES) (Grose and Mamo, 2012; Gallun et al, 2014; Spencer et al, 2016; Best and Swaminathan, 2019; Baltzell et al, 2020)
Summary
The ability to process the information available in pressure waves arriving at the two ears (“binaural hearing”) is available to living creatures ranging from insects (Hedwig and Stumpner, 2016) to humans (for review see Stecker and Gallun, 2012).
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