Comparison of subjective self-reported hearing and objective speech-in-noise perception as predictors of social isolation and loneliness in adults 60 years and older.

Objective: Hearing decline in ageing increases the risk of loneliness and social isolation. This correlation is most often observed when hearing is measured by subjective self-report, and less often for objectively measured speech listening ability, raising questions about differences between self-assessments and behavioural performance. This study compared self-reported hearing ability and objective speech-in-noise performance as predictors of loneliness and social isolation in adults older than 60.

Neural responses to naturalistic audiovisual speech are related to listening demand in cochlear implant users.

There is a weak relationship between clinical and self-reported speech perception outcomes in cochlear implant (CI) listeners. Such poor correspondence may be due to differences in clinical and "real-world" listening environments and stimuli. Speech in the real world is often accompanied by visual cues, background environmental noise, and is generally in a conversational context, all factors that could affect listening demand.

Evidence of visual crossmodal reorganization positively relates to speech outcomes in cochlear implant users.

Deaf individuals who use a cochlear implant (CI) have remarkably different outcomes for auditory speech communication ability. One factor assumed to affect CI outcomes is visual crossmodal plasticity in auditory cortex, where deprived auditory regions begin to support non-auditory functions such as vision. Previous research has viewed crossmodal plasticity as harmful for speech outcomes for CI users if it interferes with sound processing, while others have demonstrated that plasticity related to visual language may be beneficial for speech recovery.

Magnetic Targeting of Gadolinium Contrast to Enhance MRI of the Inner Ear in Endolymphatic Hydrops.

Objectives: 1. Determine the feasibility and efficiency of local magnetic targeting delivery of gadolinium (Gad) contrast to the inner ear in rodents. 2.

Local magnetic delivery of adeno-associated virus AAV2(quad Y-F)-mediated BDNF gene therapy restores hearing after noise injury.

Moderate noise exposure may cause acute loss of cochlear synapses without affecting the cochlear hair cells and hearing threshold; thus, it remains "hidden" to standard clinical tests. This cochlear synaptopathy is one of the main pathologies of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). There is no effective treatment for NIHL, mainly because of the lack of a proper drug-delivery technique.

Cortical alpha oscillations in cochlear implant users reflect subjective listening effort during speech-in-noise perception.

Listening to speech in noise is effortful for individuals with hearing loss, even if they have received a hearing prosthesis such as a hearing aid or cochlear implant (CI). At present, little is known about the neural functions that support listening effort. One form of neural activity that has been suggested to reflect listening effort is the power of 8-12 Hz (alpha) oscillations measured by electroencephalography (EEG).

Neural correlates of visual stimulus encoding and verbal working memory differ between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing controls.

A common concern for individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss fitted with cochlear implants (CIs) is difficulty following conversations in noisy environments. Recent work has suggested that these difficulties are related to individual differences in brain function, including verbal working memory and the degree of cross-modal reorganization of auditory areas for visual processing. However, the neural basis for these relationships is not fully understood.

Poor early cortical differentiation of speech predicts perceptual difficulties of severely hearing-impaired listeners in multi-talker environments.

Hearing impairment disrupts processes of selective attention that help listeners attend to one sound source over competing sounds in the environment. Hearing prostheses (hearing aids and cochlear implants, CIs), do not fully remedy these issues. In normal hearing, mechanisms of selective attention arise through the facilitation and suppression of neural activity that represents sound sources.

Envelope following responses, noise exposure, and evidence of cochlear synaptopathy in humans: Correction and comment.

A correction and comment are provided for a recent article by Paul, Waheed, Bruce, and Roberts [(2017). J. Acoust.

Towards an objective test of chronic tinnitus: Properties of auditory cortical potentials evoked by silent gaps in tinnitus-like sounds.

A common method designed to identify if an animal hears tinnitus assumes that tinnitus "fills-in" silent gaps in background sound. This phenomenon has not been reliably demonstrated in humans. One test of the gap-filling hypothesis would be to determine if gap-evoked cortical potentials are absent or attenuated when measured within background sound matched to the tinnitus sensation.

Subcortical amplitude modulation encoding deficits suggest evidence of cochlear synaptopathy in normal-hearing 18-19 year olds with higher lifetime noise exposure.

Noise exposure and aging can damage cochlear synapses required for suprathreshold listening, even when cochlear structures needed for hearing at threshold remain unaffected. To control for effects of aging, behavioral amplitude modulation (AM) detection and subcortical envelope following responses (EFRs) to AM tones in 25 age-restricted (18-19 years) participants with normal thresholds, but different self-reported noise exposure histories were studied. Participants with more noise exposure had smaller EFRs and tended to have poorer AM detection than less-exposed individuals.

Evidence that hidden hearing loss underlies amplitude modulation encoding deficits in individuals with and without tinnitus.

Damage to auditory nerve fibers that expresses with suprathreshold sounds but is hidden from the audiogram has been proposed to underlie deficits in temporal coding ability observed among individuals with otherwise normal hearing, and to be present in individuals experiencing chronic tinnitus with clinically normal audiograms. We tested whether these individuals may have hidden synaptic losses on auditory nerve fibers with low spontaneous rates of firing (low-SR fibers) that are important for coding suprathreshold sounds in noise while high-SR fibers determining threshold responses in quiet remain relatively unaffected. Tinnitus and control subjects were required to detect the presence of amplitude modulation (AM) in a 5 kHz, suprathreshold tone (a frequency in the tinnitus frequency region of the tinnitus subjects, whose audiometric thresholds were normal to 12 kHz).

Evidence for differential modulation of primary and nonprimary auditory cortex by forward masking in tinnitus.

It has been proposed that tinnitus is generated by aberrant neural activity that develops among neurons in tonotopic of regions of primary auditory cortex (A1) affected by hearing loss, which is also the frequency region where tinnitus percepts localize (Eggermont and Roberts 2004; Roberts et al., 2010, 2013). These models suggest (1) that differences between tinnitus and control groups of similar age and audiometric function should depend on whether A1 is probed in tinnitus frequency region (TFR) or below it, and (2) that brain responses evoked from A1 should track changes in the tinnitus percept when residual inhibition (RI) is induced by forward masking.

Modulation of electrocortical brain activity by attention in individuals with and without tinnitus.

Age and hearing-level matched tinnitus and control groups were presented with a 40 Hz AM sound using a carrier frequency of either 5 kHz (in the tinnitus frequency region of the tinnitus subjects) or 500 Hz (below this region). On attended blocks subjects pressed a button after each sound indicating whether a single 40 Hz AM pulse of variable increased amplitude (target, probability 0.67) had or had not occurred.

Issues of rigor and feasibility when observing the quality of program implementation: a case study.

Program evaluators have paid little attention in the literature to the manner in which measuring the quality of implementation with observations requires tradeoffs between rigor (reliability and validity) and program evaluation feasibility. We present a case example of how we addressed rigor in light of feasibility concerns when developing and conducting observations for measuring the quality of implementation of a small education professional development program. We discuss the results of meta-evaluative analyses of the reliability of the quality observations, and we present conclusions about conducting observations in a rigorous and feasible manner.

Dialogue on private events.

In the fall of 2003, the authors corresponded on the topic of private events on the listserv of the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group. Extracts from that correspondence raised questions about the role of response amplitude in determining units of analysis, whether private events can be investigated directly, and whether covert behavior differs from other behavior except in amplitude. Most participants took a cautious stance, noting not only conceptual pitfalls and empirical difficulties in the study of private events, but doubting the value of interpretive exercises about them.