A psychophysical JND in signal-to-noise ratio does not guarantee subjectively meaningful benefit to patients

Evidence

This is a curiously under-studied area: previously there has been only one small study related to measuring the just-noticeable difference (JND) in SNR by Killion ( 2004 ), in which unspecified participants were at chance discriminating a 2 dB SNR difference for speech in noise. A JND, though, is just a psychophysical benchmark; it is not clear a priori that a change of one JND is necessary or sufficient for the change to have any subjective importance to an individual. What is meaningful and clinically significant is key to service-wide treatments, and could be vital for determining provision criteria as well as tempering expectations for the patient. The current study looks at what could induce intervention-seeking behaviour for an individual; that is, how much subjective value do patients ascribe to discriminable speech intelligibility benefits? — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5672

Categorization

• QUESTION: Only one prior small study has measured the JND for SNR in speech — why so under-studied given its centrality to hearing aid fitting?
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the JND (psychophysical discriminability) from clinically/subjectively meaningful benefit as separate constructs.
• XREF: connects to: Status is judged by gestalt sensibility, not isolated signals — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 248