Age-normal hearing can be less sensitive to intensity than aided impaired hearing

Evidence

Hearing aid users wearing their hearing aid generally showed the same pattern of affect ratings as participants with age-normal hearing, especially for the valence dimension. However, for arousal ratings, those wearing a hearing aid were actually more sensitive to intensity differences than participants in the reference group. This may be because hearing in the reference group was normal for their age, but still implied elevated high-frequency thresholds. Consequently, older adults in the reference group were less sensitive, at least to some acoustic differences, than the hearing aid users. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1377

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the naive assumption that any hearing aid user is worse off than an age-normal listener; echoes surprise findings elsewhere about aided users out-perceiving ‘normal’ controls on specific dimensions.