Complex stimulus perception with cochlear implants

描述(由申请者提供)：今天的人工耳蜗听众享受 在安静的情况下有相当好的言语理解能力，但通常情况下会遇到严重的情况 在有背景音的情况下表现变差。要提供 在存在的情况下通过人工耳蜗植入的可用语音信息 相互竞争的来源(演讲或非演讲)，基本原则 电刺激对复杂、多通道刺激的感知 需要对听觉系统进行研究。这项提案旨在调查 人工耳蜗听者对复杂模式知觉的潜在机制。 这项研究的长期目标是发现 电刺激和正常听力的复杂刺激知觉 听觉系统。我们将调查两个假设： A)人工耳蜗术可以使用知觉组织原则 用于区分来自多个来源的声音的监听器 B)一般来说，噪声在生物系统的信号处理中很重要 特别是通过听觉系统，以及正确的噪音类型引入 植入人工耳蜗将是有益的。 所提出的实验旨在测量知觉交互作用。 在具有相似/不相似时间包络的脉冲序列载波之间 令人兴奋的邻近/远距离音调位置。方法将包括检测 和复杂刺激的辨别，知觉差异测量，以及 听觉串流测量。噪声对包络线索检测的影响 在单通道和多通道中，将测量复合刺激。这是意料之中的 这项研究将对听觉机制产生根本性的洞察 人工耳蜗植入物的感知。由于它们的基本性质， 这些发现也可能进一步加深我们对正常情况下 功能正常的听觉系统。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant):Cochlear implant listeners today enjoy reasonably good speech understanding in quiet but generally experience severe deterioration in performance in the presence of background sounds. To provide usable speech information through the cochlear implant in the presence of competing sources (speech or nonspeech), basic principles underlying the perception of complex, multichannel stimuli by the electrically stimulated auditory system need to be investigated. This proposal aims to investigate mechanisms underlying complex pattern perception by cochlear implant listeners. The long-term goal of this research is to discover fundamental principles of complex stimulus perception by both electrically stimulated and normal hearing auditory systems. Two hypotheses will be investigated: a) that principles of perceptual organization can be used by cochlear implant listeners for separating out sounds from multiple sources and b) noise is important in signal processing by biological systems in general and by the auditory system in particular, and the right kind of noise introduced into cochlear implants will be beneficial. The proposed experiments are designed to measure the perceptual interactions between pulse-train carriers with similar / dissimilar temporal envelopes exciting adjacent / distant tonotopic locations. Methods will include detection and discrimination of complex stimuli, perceptual difference measures, and auditory streaming measures. Effects of noise on the detection of envelope cues in single- and multi-channel complex stimuli will be measured. It is expected that this research will yield fundamental insight into mechanisms of auditory perception with cochlear implants. Because of their fundamental nature, the findings are likely to also further our understanding of the normally functioning auditory system.