Chapter 10: Central Auditory Processing and Hearing Loss
This chapter will cover two very different topics. The first topic is central auditory processing, this explores neural pathways, neural circuits, and anatomical locations that process sounds once the auditory nerve relays auditory signals from the inner ear. The second topic is hearing loss. For people who are born with a sense of hearing, environmental factors lead to hearing damage for everyone, and some people experience injury or illness that decreases or eliminates their sense of hearing. For people who are born without hearing, cochlear implants make hearing possible, but whether or not to join the Hearing community is often a hard choice for an individual.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how information is transmitted from the ear to the brain
- Describe the location of the primary auditory cortex (A1)
- Describe tonotopic mapping in A1
- Explain why masking happens and which frequencies it affects
- Explain why pitch perception is not affected when the fundamental frequency is masked or missing
- Describe how the auditory system is able to segregate different sounds in the environment
- Describe the coordinate system the auditory system uses to localize sound
- Describe monaural and binaural cues that help us to localize sounds
- Explain the function and anatomy of the what and where pathways
- Describe the two type of hearing loss and how they differ from each other
- Describe how age-related hearing loss affects specific frequencoes
- Explain the best ways to prevent hearing loss.
- Be able to discuss the possible treatments for children who get frequent ear infections.
- Describe when and how hearing aids are effective in cases of hearing loss
- Describe how cochlear implants works and when they are effective
This chapter was created by Sherwina Adams, Andrew Bartlett, Aliciana Bezdicek, Olivia Chareunrath, Zhijian Chen, Jacia Christiansen, Grace Cumming, Ananda Davenport, Josef Dewitt, Nicole Engelhart, Maida Fazlic, Wendy Geronimo, and Kelvin Goebel.
