Prior deactivation studies were confounded by adaptation and learning effects.

Evidence

The goal of this research was to explore the impact of electrode deactivation for adult users of the ACE strategy ensuring that participants received sufficient adaptation time with experimental maps and that learning effects were controlled for. Additionally participants’ clinical maps were optimised to ensure comparisons were made with an optimal control condition. A pitch ranking task was used to identify indiscriminable electrodes for deactivation and an additional control condition was included in which discriminable electrodes were deactivated to determine if any benefits observed were due to switching off electrodes with a poor ENI or just due to having fewer channels. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 2061