Abstract
Cochlear implant (CI) users have poor temporal pitch perception, as revealed by two key outcomes of rate discrimination tests: (i) rate discrimination thresholds (RDTs) are typically larger than the corresponding frequency difference limen for pure tones in normal hearing listeners, and (ii) above a few hundred pulses per second (i.e. the “upper limit” of pitch), CI users cannot discriminate further increases in pulse rate. Both RDTs at low rates and the upper limit of pitch vary across listeners and across electrodes in a given listener. Here, we compare across-electrode and across-subject variation in these two measures with the variation in performance on another temporal processing task, gap detection, in order to explore the limitations of temporal processing in CI users. RDTs were obtained for 4–5 electrodes in each of 10 Advanced Bionics CI users using two interleaved adaptive tracks, corresponding to standard rates of 100 and 400 pps. Gap detection was measured using the adaptive procedure and stimuli described by Bierer et al. (JARO 16:273-284, 2015), and for the same electrodes and listeners as for the rate discrimination measures. Pitch ranking was also performed using a mid-point comparison technique. There was a marginal across-electrode correlation between gap detection and rate discrimination at 400 pps, but neither measure correlated with rate discrimination at 100 pps. Similarly, there was a highly significant across-subject correlation between gap detection and rate discrimination at 400, but not 100 pps, and these two correlations differed significantly from each other. Estimates of low-rate sensitivity and of the upper limit of pitch, obtained from the pitch ranking experiment, correlated well with rate discrimination for the 100- and 400-pps standards, respectively. The results are consistent with the upper limit of rate discrimination sharing a common basis with gap detection. There was no evidence that this limitation also applied to rate discrimination at lower rates.
Highlights
A number of studies have identified an association between poor transmission of information by a subset of electrodes and degraded speech perception by cochlear implant (CI) users (Pfingst and Xu 2004; Bierer 2007; Garadat et al 2012; Long et al 2014; Noble et al 2014; Bierer et al 2015)
Cochlear implant (CI) users have poor temporal pitch perception, as revealed by two key outcomes of rate discrimination tests: (i) rate discrimination thresholds (RDTs) are typically larger than the corresponding frequency difference limen for pure tones in normal hearing listeners, and (ii) above a few hundred pulses per second, CI users cannot discriminate further increases in pulse rate. Both RDTs at low rates and the upper limit of pitch vary across listeners and across electrodes in a given listener
RDTs were obtained for 4–5 electrodes in each of 10 Advanced Bionics CI users using two interleaved adaptive tracks, corresponding to standard rates of 100 and 400pps
Summary
A number of studies have identified an association between poor transmission of information by a subset of electrodes and degraded speech perception by cochlear implant (CI) users (Pfingst and Xu 2004; Bierer 2007; Garadat et al 2012; Long et al 2014; Noble et al 2014; Bierer et al 2015). One approach has been to use psychophysical measures to infer electrode-specific information, such as the relative position of a stimulating electrode to auditory neurons, or the density of healthy neurons responding to that electrode. These measures of the Belectrode-toneuron interface^ may be used to predict performance on everyday listening tasks such as speech reception (Garadat et al 2012; DeVries et al 2015). Previous studies (Hochmair-Desoyer et al 1983; Garadat and Pfingst 2011; Bierer et al 2015) have revealed large across- and within-subject variability in GDTs, suggesting variation in temporal processing along the tonotopic array. Part of the data for the gap detection task analysed here were taken from the study by Bierer et al (2015)
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