Hi Arley: This is an excellent question. I don’t know of any printed guidelines. Not all older listeners have hearing loss, therefore you could include only those older listeners with normal hearing. Or, you can have TWO groups of older listeners: one with normal hearing and one with mild hearing loss. In your study, I would recommend the latter due to your anticipation of audiogram effects. Also, beware that anyone that has thresholds at or just over 25 dB HL at more than a few audiometric test frequencies actually has significantly reduced hearing ability, even though that is a standard audiometric cutoff. Audiologists realize this, but non-audiologists usually don’t. Try listening yourself with those little foam plugs in your ears. With those plugs, you probably still have hearing better than 25 dB at all frequencies but maybe you have 15-20 dB of loss at low frequencies. You’ll find that it is very difficult to function with them in place. A better cutoff rule for your experiment might be something like: All normal-hearing listeners had audiometric thresholds within the normal range with the restriction that, for any individual listener, thresholds at no more than two test frequencies were permitted to exceed 20 dB HL. I hope this is helpful. Christine Rankovic From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Arley Schenker Dear Auditory List, I am a master’s student working under Andrea Halpern at Bucknell University. We are running some auditory imagery studies with older (60-85 years) adults, and we are using audiometry to screen their hearing. Some of the environmental sounds we are asking participants to imagine involve somewhat high frequencies. I understand that pure tone averages greater than 25 dB HL are considered to characterize hearing loss; however, as some hearing loss is expected with aging, I am wondering whether anyone can point me to some best practices or suggestions regarding the inclusion of older adults with slight hearing loss. It's not a psychophysical study, but the participants do need to be able to hear and imagine the sounds reasonably accurately. Thanks in advance for your help, Arley Schenker |