Abstract:
Individual people often produce reliably different results on various auditory tests even when all have nominally normal hearing. An emerging topic in hearing research is the origins of these individual differences in normal-hearing people. Examples of procedures used to measure the potential contribution of genetics and hormone exposure to individual differences will be discussed, and several examples of a special instance of individual differences in hearing--sex differences--will be described. Of considerable value for the ultimate understanding of individual differences are situations in which subsets of people differ in a similar way across different auditory measures because covariations of this sort have the potential to reveal common underlying mechanisms.