Karunarathne Buddhika, Wang Tingyi, So Richard H Y, Kam Anna C S, Meddis Ray
HKUST-Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, 518057, China; Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics, Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
HKUST-Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, 518057, China; Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics, Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
Hear Res. 2018 Sep;367:124-128. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2018.07.013. Epub 2018 Jul 27.
The role of auditory efferent feedback from the medial olivocochlear system (MOCS) and the middle-ear-muscle (MEM) reflex in tonal detection tasks for humans in the presence of noise is not clearly understood. Past studies have yielded inconsistent results on the relationship between efferent feedback and tonal detection thresholds. This study attempts to address this inconsistency. Fifteen human subjects with normal hearing participated in an experiment where they were asked to identify an alarm signal in the presence of 80 dBA background (pink) noise. Masked detection thresholds were estimated using the method of two-interval forced choice (2IFC). Contralateral suppression of transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) was measured to estimate the strength of auditory efferent feedback. Subsequent correlation analysis revealed that the contralateral suppression of TEOAEs was significantly negatively correlated (r = -0.526, n = 15, p = 0.0438) with alarm-in-noise (AIN) detection thresholds under negative signal-to-noise conditions. The result implies that the stronger the auditory efferent feedback, the worse the detection thresholds and thus the poorer the tonal detection performance in the presence of loud noise.
在内侧橄榄耳蜗系统（MOCS）的听觉传出反馈以及中耳肌肉（MEM）反射在有噪声情况下人类音调检测任务中的作用尚未得到清晰理解。过去的研究在传出反馈与音调检测阈值之间的关系上得出了不一致的结果。本研究试图解决这一不一致性。15名听力正常的人类受试者参与了一项实验，在实验中他们被要求在80分贝A背景（粉红）噪声存在的情况下识别一个警报信号。使用双间隔强迫选择（2IFC）方法估计掩蔽检测阈值。测量对侧瞬态诱发耳声发射（TEOAEs）的抑制情况以估计听觉传出反馈的强度。随后的相关分析表明，在负信噪比条件下，TEOAEs的对侧抑制与噪声中警报（AIN）检测阈值显著负相关（r = -0.526，n = 15，p = 0.0438）。该结果表明，听觉传出反馈越强，检测阈值越差，因此在存在强噪声的情况下音调检测性能越差。
