Using psychoacoustics to examine a changing auditory system

Abstract

In the (long) time I was a student in Neal’s lab, I learned a rigorous, programmatic approach to psychoacoustics that was grounded in signal detection theory. Much of the work at that time followed up on Neal’s classic work in intensity discrimination and envelope processing, and how that might depend on processing within or across auditory channels. The research was tied to what was known about physiological processing in the auditory system. Research from other laboratories at the time suggested that the cochlea might adjust in response to sound via efferent feedback, and a paper by Liberman used a physiological approach that could be easily translated to psychoacoustic experiments. This inspired a search for behavioral evidence of efferent feedback to the cochlea, and an array of experiments were performed looking for effects of contralateral sound on psychoacoustic measures. While those experiments did not provide compelling evidence of efferent feedback, they sparked an interest that has continued to be a focus of my research. This talk will cover the array of experiments done at that time, and consider the results in the context of more recent results from my laboratory and other laboratories. [Work supported by NIH(NIDCD)R01 DC008327.]