Auditory skills of figure-ground and closure in air traffic controllers.

Purpose: To investigate the auditory skills of closure and figure-ground and factors associated with health, communication, and attention in air traffic controllers, and compare these variables with those of other civil and military servants.

Methods: Study participants were sixty adults with normal audiometric thresholds divided into two groups matched for age and gender: study group (SG), comprising 30 air traffic controllers and control group (CG), composed of 30 other military and civil servants. All participants were asked a number of questions regarding their health, communication, and attention, and underwent the Speech-in-Noise Test (SIN) to assess their closure skills and the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test - Ipsilateral Competitive Message (SSI-ICM) in monotic listening to evaluate their figure-ground abilities.