Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, N218 Elliott Hall, 75 East River Parkway, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
J Assoc Res Otolaryngol. 2020 Feb;21(1):61-72. doi: 10.1007/s10162-019-00738-y. Epub 2020 Feb 11.
Cochlear implant (CI) listeners typically perform poorly on tasks involving the pitch of complex tones. This limitation in performance is thought to be mainly due to the restricted number of active channels and the broad current spread that leads to channel interactions and subsequent loss of precise spectral information, with temporal information limited primarily to temporal-envelope cues. Little is known about the degree of spectral resolution required to perceive combinations of multiple pitches, or a single pitch in the presence of other interfering tones in the same spectral region. This study used noise-excited envelope vocoders that simulate the limited resolution of CIs to explore the perception of multiple pitches presented simultaneously. The results show that the resolution required for perceiving multiple complex pitches is comparable to that found in a previous study using single complex tones. Although relatively high performance can be achieved with 48 channels, performance remained near chance when even limited spectral spread (with filter slopes as steep as 144 dB/octave) was introduced to the simulations. Overall, these tight constraints suggest that current CI technology will not be able to convey the pitches of combinations of spectrally overlapping complex tones.
人工耳蜗(CI)使用者在涉及复杂音调音高的任务中表现通常较差。这种性能限制被认为主要归因于活跃通道数量有限以及导致通道相互作用和随后精确频谱信息丢失的宽电流扩散,其中时间信息主要限于时间包络线索。对于感知多个音高的组合或在同一频谱区域中存在其他干扰音时感知单个音高所需的频谱分辨率程度知之甚少。本研究使用噪声激发包络声码器来模拟 CI 的有限分辨率,以探索同时呈现的多个复杂音调的感知。结果表明,感知多个复杂音调所需的分辨率与使用单个复杂音调的先前研究中发现的分辨率相当。尽管使用 48 个通道可以实现相对较高的性能,但即使引入有限的频谱扩展(滤波器斜率高达 144dB/octave),性能仍接近机会水平。总体而言,这些严格的限制表明,当前的 CI 技术将无法传达频谱重叠复杂音调的组合的音高。