Testing hearing-impaired listeners could reveal how loudness distortion maps to brain activity

Evidence

The largely linear relationship between categorical loudness and sound intensity over the range of presented levels, as well as the fact that our participants were from a rather homogenous group of normal hearing listeners with similar loudness perception, might have limited the ability to differentiate between the contributions of both measures to neural activation in the human auditory system. A promising next step would be the inclusion of hearing impaired participants characterized by an altered relationship between sound intensity and perceived loudness (e.g., loudness recruitment). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 2610

Categorization

• SEED: Loudness recruitment as a natural experiment decoupling physical intensity from perception — a potential article on how pathology reveals neural coding.
• QUESTION: Would recruitment patients show the quadratic-vs-linear dissociation collapsing, pinpointing where the transform happens?