There are now>350,000 cochlear implant (Cl) recipients worldwide. Bilateral implantation has become a standard treatment in many countries, in an attempt to provide patients with auditory cues needed to segregate speech from noise and localize sounds. Despite notable benefits when listening with bilateral vs. unilateral Cls, most patients continue to perform significantly worse than normal hearing {NH) listeners. Binaural functioning in NH depends on neural coding of interaural differences in time level. Although today's clinical processors are designed to maximize speech understanding, they do not encode binaural cues in a reliable and suitable manner. By using reverse engineering approaches, we work towards discovering how to preserve these cues in order to ultimately design binaural Cl processors. The roles of experience, age and auditory plasticity are all important considerations in this research. Studies in children also show what benefits can be leveraged with early bilateral stimulation and longitudinal experience. In addition, improvement in speech intelligibility does not capture all the added benefits that are experienced by patients, such as reduced cognitive load or listening effort. Our recent studies are aimed at gaining insight into this dimension of real-world listening that is poorly understood, using an eye tracking system to measure pupillary responses, which have been shown to be an index of listening effort.
Course created on July 18, 2016
Professor of Communicative Disorders and Otolaryngology
Ruth Litovsky, PhD is Professor at the University of Wisconsin~Madison, Departments of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Surgery/Division of Otolaryngology. She directs the Binaural Hearing and Speech Laboratory at the Waisman Center. She is actively involved in the fields of hearing research and auditory implants. She has served on numerous grant review panels and editorial boards. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, and was a Fullbright Scholar in the Asian-Pacific program in 2014-15.
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