Re: [AUDITORY] diotic (or binaural) audiometry

[Sam Mathias <samuel.mathias@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear list,

Thanks to those who responded to my question. For anyone curious to
know the answer, it seems that binaural hearing thresholds typically
range between the BEA at worst, and 2-3 dB lower than the BEA at best.
There are existing models that do a good job of predicting this
binaural advantage. The critical thing seems to be the degree of
symmetry between the ears: individuals with thresholds that are
similar in both ears achieve the greatest binaural advantages. Based
on this, I don't think it makes sense to measure binaural thresholds
for my purposes (absolute thresholds and interaural asymmetry would be
confounded), which is good to know.

Sam

On Sun, 10 Mar 2019 at 13:25, Sam Mathias <samuel.mathias@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Dear List,
>
> Is anyone aware of studies that have measured hearing thresholds for
> tones presented over headphones to both ears at the same time, rather
> than to each ear separately? Ideally, I'm interested in a comparison
> between thresholds measured this way and thresholds measured via
> traditional, monaural audiometry.
>
> Here is the context: we are designing a study with a very limited time
> window per participant to measure hearing thresholds. Hearing is not
> the primary aim of the study and the hearing test won't be used
> diagnostically (we don't want to determine whether someone has hearing
> loss). We aren't interested interaural differences either. Most likely
> we will calculate the better ear average (BEA). Intuitively, I feel
> like someone's threshold for a tone presented to both ears will be the
> same as their BEA or perhaps slightly lower if they are able to
> combine the information presented to both ears. So I'm wondering
> whether we could measure thresholds binaurally rather than monaurally
> and collect the data in half the time.
>
> In case there are no such studies, speculations are welcome :)
>
> Thanks,
> Sam