University Park, MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom.
Hear Res. 2011 Oct;280(1-2):100-8. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2011.04.020. Epub 2011 May 27.
Surprisingly little is known about the ability of adult human listeners to learn to localize sounds in the free field. In this study, we presented broadband noise bursts at 24 equally spaced locations in a 360° horizontal plane in both normal-hearing conditions and when listeners were fitted with a unilateral earplug. Localization improvement was found over the initial four training sessions, prior to plug insertion which produced an immediate and profound impairment in localization, particularly on the side of the plug. Subsequent training with the plug in place over the next 5 days showed continually improving performance (learning) up to the 4th day. Following plug removal, localization immediately returned to pre-plug levels. These results showed that task-specific training can improve localization ability in normal-hearing conditions and that training also improves performance during a unilateral conductive hearing loss. It has been suggested that the process of learning is due to a gradual reweighting of the available cues to develop a new location map. The return to preplug learning performance suggests that the original location map is preserved despite the formation of a new map, and is in agreement with other reported findings.
关于成年人类听众在自由场中学习定位声音的能力，人们知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们在正常听力条件和听众佩戴单侧耳塞的情况下，在 360°水平平面上的 24 个等距位置呈现宽带噪声突发。在初始的四个训练会话中发现了定位改善，在插入耳塞之前，定位会立即受到严重损害，尤其是在耳塞的一侧。在接下来的 5 天内，耳塞放置的后续训练显示，直到第 4 天，性能（学习）不断提高。耳塞取出后，定位立即恢复到耳塞前的水平。这些结果表明，特定于任务的训练可以提高正常听力条件下的定位能力，并且训练也可以提高单侧传导性听力损失期间的性能。有人认为，学习的过程是由于对可用线索进行逐步重新加权，以建立新的位置图。尽管形成了新的地图，但仍恢复到耳塞前的学习表现，这与其他报告的发现一致。
