Norena Arnaud, Micheyl Christophe, Chéry-Croze Sylviane, Collet Lionel
Laboratoire Neurosciences et systèmes sensoriels, Hôpital Edouard-Herriot, CNRS UMR 5020, Lyon, France.
Audiol Neurootol. 2002 Nov-Dec;7(6):358-69. doi: 10.1159/000066156.
In this study, an original psychometric procedure was used in order to characterize in more detail than in previous studies the different perceptual components of tinnitus, i.e. auditory sensations which are perceived in the absence of a corresponding external acoustic stimulus. Ten subjects with chronic tinnitus were asked to rate on a numeric scale the contribution of elementary pitch sensations evoked by isolated frequency components to their overall tinnitus sensation. The resulting 'internal tinnitus spectra', which represented the estimated perceptual contribution to the tinnitus sensation as a function of frequency over a large range of frequencies, were found to occupy a wide frequency range corresponding largely to that at which hearing thresholds were abnormally elevated. In most cases, they exhibited a broad peak falling within the hearing loss range. This pattern of result suggests that in subjects with high-frequency hearing loss, tinnitus sensations, when present, resemble those evoked by high-frequency noise bands with, in some cases, a superimposed tonal-like pitch. These results confirm and extend earlier results in the literature and agree with the patients' reports; their practical implications for the design of future studies on tinnitus and theoretical implications for the understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying tinnitus are discussed. The results of an additional experiment showed that the internal tinnitus spectrum could be altered by perceptual training in a fine frequency discrimination task with tones in the frequency range of the main peak of the tinnitus spectrum.
在本研究中，采用了一种原创的心理测量程序，以便比以往研究更详细地描述耳鸣的不同感知成分，即 在没有相应外部声学刺激的情况下所感知到的听觉感受。10名患有慢性耳鸣的受试者被要求用数字量表对孤立频率成分诱发的基本音调感受对其整体耳鸣感受的贡献进行评分。由此产生的“内部耳鸣频谱”，表示在很宽的频率范围内，作为频率函数的对耳鸣感受的估计感知贡献，被发现占据了一个很宽的频率范围，很大程度上与听力阈值异常升高的频率范围相对应。在大多数情况下，它们在听力损失范围内呈现出一个宽峰。这种结果模式表明，在高频听力损失的受试者中，耳鸣感受（如果存在）类似于由高频噪声带诱发的感受，在某些情况下还叠加有类似音调的音高。这些结果证实并扩展了文献中早期的结果，与患者的报告一致；讨论了它们对未来耳鸣研究设计的实际意义以及对理解耳鸣潜在神经生理机制的理论意义。另一个实验的结果表明，通过在耳鸣频谱主峰频率范围内进行音调精细频率辨别任务的感知训练，可以改变内部耳鸣频谱。
