Supra-threshold psychoacoustics and envelope-following response relations: normal-hearing, synaptopathy and cochlear gain loss

Abstract

The perceptual consequences of cochlear synaptopathy are presently not well understood as a direct quantification of synaptopathy is not possible in humans. To study its role for human hearing, recent studies have instead correlated changes in basic supra-threshold psychoacoustic tasks with individual differences in subcortical EEG responses, as a proxy measure for synaptopathy. It is not clear whether the reported missing relationships between the psychoacoustic quantities and the EEG are due to the adopted methods, or to a minor role of synaptopathy for sound perception. We address this topic by studying the theoretical relationship between subcortical EEG and psychoacoustic methods for different sensorineural hearing deficits.