School of Medicine, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland-Medical University of Bahrain, Busaiteen, Kingdom of Bahrain.
Department of Biomedical Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
PLoS One. 2018 Apr 4;13(4):e0194965. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194965. eCollection 2018.
The posterior auricular muscle (PAM) reflex to sounds has been used clinically to determine hearing threshold as an alternative to other audiological diagnostic measures such as the auditory brainstem response. We have shown that the PAM response is also sensitive to interaural timing differences in normally hearing adults. PAM responses were evoked by both ipsilateral/ contralateral monaural stimulation and by binaural stimulation. Introducing sound delays ipsilaterally or contralaterally decreased the PAM response amplitude and increased its latency. The PAM response in this study shows a qualitatively similar pattern to that seen by the binaural interaction component (BIC) of the auditory brainstem potential to binaural clicks described in previous studies, in that both: have their shortest latency and maximal amplitudes centred around zero interaural timing differences, have response latencies increase with increasing interaural delays up to 1.2 ms and have response amplitudes decrease with increasing interaural delays of up to 1.2 ms. Our data show that the PAM response may be useful in measuring binaural integration in humans non-invasively for diagnostic or research studies.
耳后肌（PAM）对声音的反射已在临床上用于确定听力阈值，作为其他听觉诊断措施（如听觉脑干反应）的替代方法。我们已经表明，PAM 反应对正常听力成年人的两耳时间差异也很敏感。PAM 反应可由同侧/对侧单耳刺激和双耳刺激引起。同侧或对侧引入声音延迟会降低 PAM 反应幅度并增加其潜伏期。本研究中的 PAM 反应与先前研究中双耳点击的听觉脑干电位的双耳相互作用分量（BIC）所观察到的反应模式在性质上相似，即两者均具有最短潜伏期和最大幅度集中在零两耳时间差异周围，随着两耳延迟增加，反应潜伏期增加至 1.2 毫秒，随着两耳延迟增加至 1.2 毫秒，反应幅度减小。我们的数据表明，PAM 反应可用于非侵入性地测量人类的双耳整合，用于诊断或研究。
