Deactivating indiscriminable implant electrodes fails to improve and even worsens perception

Evidence

A cross-over study was conducted with 13 adult CI users who received experimental maps with de-activated channels for a minimum of 2 months and these were compared to optimised clinical maps. The findings showed that there were no significant benefits of electrode de-activation on speech perception and that there was a significant deterioration in spectro-temporal ripple perception when electrodes were switched off. There were no significant differences between de-activation of discriminable or indiscriminable electrodes. These findings suggest that electrode de-activation with n-of-m strategies may not be beneficial. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 2046

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my reading on silence and signal processing in The Soundscape — the idea that removing redundant channels degrades rather than cleans the percept, an analogy to over-filtering soundscapes.
• QUESTION: Why would removing low-information electrodes degrade spectro-temporal ripple perception rather than merely not help? Mechanism worth chasing — possibly the n-of-m strategy competes for remaining channels.