Scott Bressler on Differentiating sensory and cognitive auditory processing deficits
Date:
Fri, 02/22/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Location:
CCRMA Seminar Room
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar Scott Bressler (from BU) will at CCRMA on Friday morning to talk about measurements he has done using EEG to help elucidate the differences in our hearing ability, using patients who have been exposed to blasts (and thus are often younger than the normal hearing aid patient.) Using the brainstem’s responses to steady-state tones he studies whether a hearing problem is caused by sensory or cortical issues. Hearing aids correct some problems using amplification (and compression). But there still remain a large number of patients who are not helped, and this is often blamed on "hidden hearing loss." Where does this come from?
Who: Scott Bressler (BU)
When: Friday, February 22 at 10:30AM
What: Differentiating sensory and cognitive auditory processing deficits: EEG measures in blast-exposed military service members
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (Top Floor of the Knoll)
Why: Our hearing is magical, and somewhat hidden
Come to CCRMA and we’ll talk about how we can understand the different reasons that people might not hear us.
- Malcolm
Differentiating sensory and cognitive auditory processing deficits: EEG measures in blast-exposed military service members
Scott Bressler (Boston University)
Our ability to have meaningful conversations depends not only on how well we hear, but also on our ability to segregate competing sound sources from one another and shift our attentional focus to a source or sources of interest. Understanding the interplay between the neural encoding of acoustic information in the sensory periphery and the cognitive processes required to control attention and working memory is critical to understanding problems with speech perception and communication in crowded and noisy environments. Commonly associated with aging, these complications have also been reported in a subset of younger adult (18-52 yrs; median age 30.5 yrs) blast-exposed military service members with normal to near-normal pure tone audiometric thresholds. The work I will present in this talk investigates whether these complications are due to 1) damage to the auditory sensory periphery currently not tested for in standard clinical evaluations or 2) blast-induced neurotrauma to cortical regions associated with attention and working memory. Using electroencephalography, we measured brainstem steady state frequency following responses (FFRs) to amplitude modulated tones at various modulation depths to evaluate the health of suprathreshold responding auditory nerve fibers, which have been linked to cochlear synaptopathy, commonly referred to as “hidden hearing loss.” To assess cognitive processing associated with attention, we measured evoked responses to attended and ignored stimuli in specially designed auditory and visual selective attention tasks. Preliminary results suggest subclinical differences in audiometric measures alone might explain differences in suprathreshold listening ability.
FREE
Open to the Public