Inherent envelope fluctuations in forward masking: Effects of age and hearing loss

Abstract

Forward masking is generally greater for Gaussian noise (GN) than for low-fluctuation noise (LFN) maskers for listeners with and without sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). Because older age and SNHL may affect recovery from masker envelope fluctuations differently, the current study explored which of these two factors contributed more substantially to the persistence of GN disruption. GN disruption was measured using three masker-signal delays (25, 75, and 150 ms) for three adult participant groups: younger listeners with normal hearing (YNH), older participants with normal, or near-normal, hearing (ONH), and older participants with sensorineural hearing loss (OSNHL). The role of underlying mechanisms was tested using a computational model for midbrain neurons. The primary result suggests that older listeners with normal or near normal hearing may be more susceptible to the deleterious effects of masker-envelope fluctuations than younger listeners with normal hearing. Results from the computational model propose that there may be a larger influence of efferent feedback and saturation of inner hair cells on GN disruption than previously expected.

Subcortical Auditory Model including Efferent Dynamic Gain Control with Inputs from Cochlear Nucleus and Inferior Colliculus

“…Other physiological and psychoacoustic studies can be used to further fine tune the model’s parameters and structure. For example, forward-masking studies with long-duration maskers would be expected to activate the MOC efferent system (Krull and Strickland, 2008; Brennan et al, 2023). At the level of the IC, further animal studies of the temporal properties of responses to complex sounds would contribute to this modeling effort, such as investigating the changes in synchrony of IC responses to the envelope of AM stimuli over time.…”

“…Other physiological and psychoacoustic studies can be used to further fine tune the model's parameters and structure. For example, forward-masking studies with long-duration maskers would be expected to activate the MOC efferent system (Krull and Strickland, 2008;Brennan et al, 2023).…”

“…Model code will be made freely available as downloadable files (Farhadi et al, 2023) from the Open Science Framework, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/UZYW4.…”

A fast and flexible approximation of power-law adaptation for auditory computational models

“…For example, the phenomenological auditory-nerve (AN) model of Zilany, Bruce, and Carney (2014), hereafter the ZBC model, has been used extensively by several groups in recent years to pursue a wide range of psychophysical and physiological questions (Carney and McDonough, 2019;Bianchi et al, 2019;Maxwell et al, 2020;Saddler et al, 2021;Polonenko and Maddox, 2021;Zaar and Carney, 2022;Guest and Oxenham, 2022;Feather et al, 2022;Carney et al, 2023;Hamza et al, 2023;Lindboom et al, 2023;Brennan et al, 2023). Differences among models often reflect differences in the underlying goals of those who build them (Osses et al, 2022).…”