Mono mixed spatial-task evidence contradicts the assumption that hearing loss disrupts spatial processing globally

Evidence

In many situations, listeners with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) demonstrate reduced SRM compared to listeners with normal hearing (NH). This observation commonly leads to the conclusion that spatial processing is disrupted by hearing loss. However, convergent evidence from other kinds of spatial tasks is somewhat lacking. For example, studies that have measured fine discrimination of binaural cues have noted that individual variability is high, and some HI listeners perform as well as NH listeners (e.g. Colburn 1982 ; Spencer 2013 ). Free-field localization is not strongly affected by hearing loss unless it is highly asymmetric or very severe at low frequencies (e.g. Noble et al. 1994 ). Other studies have tried to relate SRM in multitalker environments to localization ability (Noble et al. 1997 ; Hawley et al. 1999 ) or to binaural sensitivity (Strelcyk and Dau 2009 ; Spencer 2013 ) with mixed results. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1724

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the general pattern in this reading list where apparent deficits attributed to a mechanism are sometimes confounded by a more mundane cause (here audibility).
• QUESTION: What exactly defines the ‘spatial processing’ claim being challenged, and which binaural sensitivity measures (e.g. interaural level vs time difference thresholds) show HI listeners matching NH?