Loudness recruitment shrinks dynamic range while preserving overall loudness

Evidence

Fowler conducted numerous studies on measuring absolute thresholds in listeners with hearing loss. He was the first to report that listeners with sensorineural hearing loss experience a smaller dynamic range but a similar range of loudness as listeners with normal hearing. He called this phenomenon loudness recruitment (Fowler, 1928), a term we still adopt today. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 100

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines loudness recruitment: sensorineural hearing loss produces a smaller dynamic range but a similar range of total loudness.
• XREF: Connects to the reading goal of comparing normal vs. impaired hearing perception — this is the core phenomenon separating the two.

Related

• Sensorineural hearing loss compresses the full loudness range into fewer decibels (similarity 0.91)
• The full loudness range squeezes into a smaller dynamic range for impaired listeners. (similarity 0.88)
• Recruitment can explain why loudness summation is absent in noise-induced hearing loss (similarity 0.88)
• Hearing-impaired listeners experience a steeper loudness-growth function known as recruitment (similarity 0.87)
• Sensorineural hearing loss produces rapid loudness growth while discomfort thresholds stay normal (similarity 0.87)
• Understanding loudness’s neural basis could improve recruitment treatment (similarity 0.87)
• Loudness-growth slope increases with hearing-loss degree but resists exact prediction (similarity 0.86)
• Loudness recruitment in impaired listeners could reveal how cortex encodes perceived level (similarity 0.86)
• Sensorineural hearing loss causes abnormal rapid loudness growth called recruitment (similarity 0.86)
• Recruitment-induced loudness discomfort in aided listeners is a level artifact, not hypersensitivity (similarity 0.86)
• Hearing-impaired patients with loudness recruitment could disentangle intensity and loudness encoding. (similarity 0.86)
• Mild-moderate losses show recruitment while severe-profound losses show underrecruitment (similarity 0.85)
• In hearing-impaired regions loudness grows far faster with level (similarity 0.85)
• Loudness recruitment in hearing loss could be probed via Heschl’s gyrus fMRI (similarity 0.85)
• Comparing normal and recruiting-impaired listeners would reveal where loudness is decoded (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Recruitment-induced loudness discomfort in aided listeners is a level artifact, not hypersensitivity #expands (0.82) — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1691