Brungart Douglas S, Cohen Julie, Cord Mary, Zion Danielle, Kalluri Sridhar
Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, 4954 North Palmer Road, Bethesda, Maryland 20889.
Starkey Hearing Research Center, 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California 94704.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2014 Oct;136(4):1808-20. doi: 10.1121/1.4893932.
In the real world, listeners often need to track multiple simultaneous sources in order to maintain awareness of the relevant sounds in their environments. Thus, there is reason to believe that simple single source sound localization tasks may not accurately capture the impact that a listening device such as a hearing aid might have on a listener's level of auditory awareness. In this experiment, 10 normal hearing listeners and 20 hearing impaired listeners were tested in a task that required them to identify and localize sound sources in three different listening tasks of increasing complexity: a single-source localization task, where listeners identified and localized a single sound source presented in isolation; an added source task, where listeners identified and localized a source that was added to an existing auditory scene, and a remove source task, where listeners identified and localized a source that was removed from an existing auditory scene. Hearing impaired listeners completed these tasks with and without the use of their previously fit hearing aids. As expected, the results show that performance decreased both with increasing task complexity and with the number of competing sound sources in the acoustic scene. The results also show that the added source task was as sensitive to differences in performance across listening conditions as the standard localization task, but that it correlated with a different pattern of subjective and objective performance measures across listeners. This result suggests that a measure of complex auditory situation awareness such as the one tested here may be a useful tool for evaluating differences in performance across different types of listening devices, such as hearing aids or hearing protection devices.
在现实世界中，听众通常需要追踪多个同时出现的声源，以便保持对周围环境中相关声音的感知。因此，有理由相信，简单的单声源声音定位任务可能无法准确捕捉诸如助听器等听力设备对听众听觉感知水平的影响。在本实验中，10名听力正常的听众和20名听力受损的听众参与了一项任务测试，该任务要求他们在三种复杂度递增的不同听力任务中识别并定位声源：单声源定位任务，即听众识别并定位单独呈现的单个声源；添加声源任务，即听众识别并定位添加到现有听觉场景中的声源；移除声源任务，即听众识别并定位从现有听觉场景中移除的声源。听力受损的听众在佩戴和不佩戴之前适配的助听器两种情况下完成这些任务。正如预期的那样，结果表明，随着任务复杂度的增加以及声学场景中竞争声源数量的增加，表现会下降。结果还表明，添加声源任务与标准定位任务一样，对不同听力条件下的表现差异敏感，但它与不同听众的主观和客观表现测量模式相关。这一结果表明，像此处测试的这种复杂听觉情境感知测量方法，可能是评估不同类型听力设备（如助听器或听力保护设备）表现差异的有用工具。
