Patients with implanted artificial cochlea often complain that they cannot recognize speech well in natural environments, especially if background noise is there.
Researchers think that a poor ability to localize sound in a complex auditory environment is responsible for the weak speech perception observed under these conditions. Pentobarbital anesthesia prolongs the recovery time of responses to lagging stimulus.
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The effects of pentobarbital anesthesia on the precedence effect stem from decreased dissociation of gamma-aminobutyric acid from its receptor (i.e., it is a gamma-aminobutyric acid agonist). Therefore, Yanjun Wang and co-workers from Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University in China investigated how neurons in the inferior colliculus respond to the paired sounds that produce precedence-effect illusions, and whether their firing behavior can be modulated through inhibition with gamma-aminobutyric acid.
They found that after local gamma-aminobutyric acid application, responses to the lagging stimulus were suppressed. This result, published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 4, 2014), can provide a new approach for auditory localization and speech understanding of patients with hearing aids under background noise.
Source: Eurekalert
Source: Eurekalert
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