Estimating human sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation (STM) has become an important way to characterize suprathreshold processing abilities, accounting for variability in speech understanding in noise in a way that simple audiometric measures cannot. STM metrics have increasing clinical applications, including for hearing-aid and cochlear-implant programming and evaluation. We know that STM sensitivity likely requires acuity in both the spectral and temporal domains, yet the mechanisms underlying STM processing by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired humans remain a subject of debate. This session will bring together STM experts in the areas of neurophysiology, psychophysics, modeling, and clinical application, with the goals of furthering our understanding of STM processing and elucidating the mechanisms we are tapping into when applying these tests clinically. This introductory presentation will provide a brief history of STM tasks, their relationship to speech understanding, and questions regarding the spectral and temporal mechanisms they target. The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
Joshua G. Bernstein (Wed,) studied this question.