| Literature DB >> 35505627 |
Martin Eklöf1,2, Filip Asp1,2, Erik Berninger1,3.
Abstract
With the advances in eye tracking, saccadic reflexes towards auditory stimuli have become an easily accessible behavioral response. The present study investigated the development of horizontal sound localization latency quantified by saccadic reflexes in infants and young children with normal hearing (0.55 to 5.6 years, n = 22). The subject was seated in front of an array of 12 loudspeaker/display-pairs arranged equidistantly in an arc from -55 to + 55° azimuth. An ongoing auditory-visual stimulus was presented at 63 dB SPL and shifted to another randomly selected pair at 24 occasions. At each shift, the visual part of the stimulus was blanked for 1.6 s providing auditory-only localization cues. A sigmoid model was fitted to the gaze samples following the azimuthal sound shifts. The overall sound localization latency (SLL) for a subject was defined as the mean of the latencies for all trials included by objective criteria. The SLL was assessed in 21 of 22 children with a mean of 6.1 valid trials. The SLL ranged 400 to 1400 ms (mean = 860 ms). An inverse model demonstrated a significant relationship between SLL and age (R2 = 0.79, p < 0.001), reflecting a distinct reduction of latency with increasing age. No partial correlation between SLL and sound localization accuracy was found when controlling for age (p = 0.5), suggesting that localization latency may provide diagnostic value beyond accuracy.Entities:
Keywords: auditory target; reaction time; response latency; saccade
Mesh:
Year: 2022 PMID: 35505627 PMCID: PMC9073128 DOI: 10.1177/23312165221088398
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Trends Hear ISSN: 2331-2165 Impact factor: 3.496
Figure 1.Sound localization latency (SLL) as a function of age for the 21 subjects for which latencies could be obtained. The grey area depicts the 95% confidence interval of the regression.
Figure 2.Included sigmoid functions, based on samples of intersections between eye gaze and areas of interest, for each subject. The heading of each panel denotes the subject's age in years. The time axis includes the auditory-only period of 1.6 s. The vertical dashed line indicates the SLL for the subject. The subject was fixating on the previous target LD-pair which presented both auditory and visual stimuli before the next trial in accordance with the current procedure.
Figure 3.Sound localization accuracy (Error index) for all 21 subjects. The grey area depicts the 95% confidence interval of the regression. The accuracy (Error index) of 12 of the subjects was presented in Asp et al. (2016).
Figure 4.The grey areas depict the 95% confidence interval of the linear regressions. While A shows SLL as a function of age for all subjects (N = 21), B, D, and F shows the same analysis but divided in three age groups with 6-8 subjects in each age interval. C, E, G shows the corresponding linear regression between SLL and EI in the same age intervals (B, C: ≤ 0.8 years, N = 7, D, E: >0.8 and ≤ 1.6 years, N = 8, F, G: >1.6 years of age, N = 6)). Notably, the correlation of SLL and age is significant in each age group whereas there is no correlation between SLL and EI. The accuracy (Error index) of 12 of the subjects was presented in Asp et al. (2016).