There are a couple of things at the top of my list to fix about my daughter’s cochlear implant. Of course, as previously mentioned here, I would like her to be able to wear her implant in the water. I would like her to be able to hear better in really noisy environments. And, I would like her to be able to tell which way sound is coming from (she has only one implant). This last item is a safety thing as much as anything else.
As it happens, I live in Dallas which is (lucky for me) home for the University of Texas at Dallas Callier Center. They have world class cochlear implant resources, and have amazed me and my daughter with their abilities. There are lots of graduate students and professors running around there, and they do cool research (some of which he have participated in).
They recently posted the results of a study on their blog that interested me. Researchers ran a test to see if adults with unilateral cochlear implants could “localize noise and speech signals in the horizontal plane” – tell which direction sound was coming from.
The test used an array of loudspeakers set at angles from the subject and short bursts of sound. They concluded that “some unilaterally implanted subjects can localize sounds at a better than chance level, apparently because they can learn to make use of subtle monaural cues based on frequency-dependent head-shadow effects.”
I thought this was really cool. I see my daughter doing this sometimes, but I could not understand how. The did note that the performance of adults with unilateral cochlear implants was “significantly poorer than that reported in previous studies of bilaterally implanted subjects, who are able to take advantage of binaural cues.”
Pretty cool.
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