Response bias shifts audiometric thresholds away from a patient’s true hearing abilities

Evidence

Inspecting the two data sets more carefully, it becomes clear that there is a systematic difference between the results. It seems that at least for sounds that are not extremely loud, i.e. have an SPL smaller than about 80 dB, the subjects have the tendency to set the variable sound louder than expected. This seems to be reasonable for faint and intermediate loud sounds. In this case, the subjects want to have the sound in a loudness range that corresponds to good audibility, i.e. fairly loud. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1193 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Auditory assessment must account for the listener’s response bias, not just sensitivity (similarity 0.97)
• Subjects bias adjustment experiments by setting sounds louder for good audibility (similarity 0.91)
• Adjustment methods bias moderate sounds toward louder settings for good audibility. (similarity 0.90)
• Neither conservative nor liberal response bias yields accurate hearing thresholds (similarity 0.85)
• Exaggerated hearing loss appears as an overly conservative response bias during audiometry (similarity 0.83)
• Threshold estimates reflect both ear sensitivity and listener response bias (similarity 0.83)
• Hearing-impaired listeners vary more than normal hearers in quiet threshold, complicating averaging (similarity 0.82)
• Response bias distorts threshold measurements in hearing experiments. (similarity 0.82)
• Listener personality biases reported auditory thresholds across subjects (similarity 0.82)
• Spectrally shaped targets can equalize audibility across listeners with differing audiograms. (similarity 0.82)
• Method-of-limits thresholds are distorted by subjects’ response tendencies (similarity 0.82)
• Individual loudness functions link psychoacoustic scaling to fMRI stimulus conditions (similarity 0.82)
• Some false positives during threshold testing indicate healthy response bias (similarity 0.82)
• Loudness growth is linear up to 80 dB then steepens near 90 dB (similarity 0.82)
• Loudness perception strongly shapes the decision weights listeners assign to sound components (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Subjects bias adjustment experiments by setting sounds louder for good audibility #exemplifies (0.92) — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1193