PERCEPTUAL DIFFICULTIES ASSOCIATED WITH HYPERACUSIS: ASSESSMENTS AND MODEL DEVELOPMENT

Some people find sound levels of average volume to be too loud or even painfully loud. This condition is called hyperacusis and affects at least 15% of the population. People with hyperacusis often find it difficult to follow speech in certain situations, especially when there is background noise. This can affect a person's quality of life, such that they may regularly avoid certain social situations. Hyperacusis may arise due to damage at some level of the auditory system. There may be damage to the way in which sounds are processed within the inner ear. There could also be damage to the nerve structures and nerve pathways that convey information from the ear to the brain, or from the brain to the ear. People with hyperacusis may report different problems with their hearing due to varying degree of damage to some, or all, of these auditory structures or nerve pathways. This project will use psychological tests of sound and speech perception and recordings of neural activity from the brain (using sensors) to obtain an understanding of which auditory structures and nerve pathways are involved in the normal perception of loudness. We shall use these tests to measure sound and speech perception in people that do not have hyperacusis and also people that have had hyperacusis for different lengths of time. The data from these tests will then be used to create a computational model that can simulate the auditory processing in different parts of the auditory pathway. The model will be used to improve our understanding of hyperacusis by simulating how different types of damage to auditory structures and neural pathways can interact to contribute to hyperacusis. The model will also be used to simulate the difficulties people with hyperacusis have when listening to speech in noisy backgrounds.