Effects of asymmetries on binaural-hearing abilities across the lifespan - ABSTRACT: Binaural hearing allows people to benefit from perceiving sounds from different spatial locations and is critical in solving the “cocktail party problem” (i.e., understanding speech in the presence of competing background sounds and noise). A vast majority of human binaural-hearing data have been collected in partici- pants with highly symmetric hearing thresholds (≤10 dB threshold differences across the ears). Those with hear- ing asymmetries will include many of the 80 million “Baby Boomers” in the US who are reaching the important milestone of older age (>65 yrs). As we get older, hearing loss increases, binaural abilities decrease, and the cocktail party problem becomes increasingly difficult. We know very little about how binaural hearing is impacted by hearing asymmetries and how it changes across the lifespan. The long-term goal of this research is to deter- mine the mechanisms underlying how age and hearing loss impact speech-perception in noise and cocktail- party situations. The objective of this proposed project is to understand how age-related binaural-hearing deficits are affected by small to large hearing asymmetries. To achieve this objective, we will undertake two specific aims: 1) generate an audiological and binaural-hearing dataset for a large cohort of participants that vary in hearing asymmetry, age, and hearing loss; and 2) use machine learning to generate innovative and unexpected hypotheses relating audiometric variables and basic binaural-hearing abilities to the cocktail-party problem. The need is great because the typical approach usually provides modest (and expected) increments of knowledge. Using of machine learning has the power to uncover complex associations in large data sets to generate inno- vative and unexpected hypotheses, but has not yet been applied to understanding aging, hearing loss, and binaural hearing. This knowledge will help us better understand how hearing asymmetries affect communication in cocktail-party situations as individuals age and lose their hearing. This contribution of this research is signifi- cant because it will lead to improvements and breakthroughs in audiological care and hearing interventions, which will only be possible once we better understand how the cocktail party problem and spatial-hearing abilities change with age, hearing loss, and hearing asymmetry.
