An Auditory Test Battery for Professional Screening

A series of auditory tests (over 20 variables) were performed on two groups of normal- hearing listeners, for a total of 107 persons, 61 men and 46 women, whose ages ranged from 14 to 50 with a majority between 20 and 25. The variables tested were absolute and masked detection thresholds, and discrimination thresholds.

The first goal of this study was to get an estimate of the normal distribution of auditory capabilities for intensity, frequency, time and space perception. From a statistical analysis of our results, a "Psychoacoustic Profile" can be defined (plot of the auditory performance in terms of Z-scores, as a function of the variables tested), for each individual or for groups of individuals, based on a limited set of variables, that might prove to be a useful tool for some professional applications.

The long-term scientific goal of this investigation is to build a simplified model for auditory perception, through a multidimensional representation of the individual. In this model, the main features of auditory perception would be represented by independent vectors, and each individual by his components relative to these vectors, leading to some sort of auditory ID. In this study, a Principal Component Analysis of our data is used as a first approach, the first factors of which are taken as the independent vectors that we are looking for, and the variables that have the highest correlation with these factors are used to measure individual components.