Cochlear gain loss may paradoxically enhance modulation sensitivity in broadband noise

Evidence

Lastly, it is interesting to observe that AM detection performance in the mild HI listeners was significantly more impacted by the NB than the BB noise. This difference was not observed for the NH listeners. If the NB condition reflects a temporal coding deficit, then it appeared not to dictate performance in the BB condition for the HI listeners, suggesting that perhaps the overall loss of compression due to cochlear gain loss would enhance modulation sensitivity such that a fixed-level BB noise did not degrade performance substantially, despite the reduced temporal coding observed from the EFR measures. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5907

Categorization

• QUESTION: The proposed mechanism — that compression loss enhances modulation sensitivity — is presented as a tentative hypothesis; worth chasing whether psychoacoustic models support this apparent compensation effect.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in cochlear compression nonlinearity and envelope coding; echoes loudness growth/compression discussions in prior psychoacoustics literature.