SELECT: Towards more Selective Stimulation with Cochlear Implants

Duration: currently in planning phase, to be submitted

Funding:

• FFG Bridge to be resubmitted by March 2022

Co-operation partners:

• MED-EL Corp., Innsbruck, Austria

Objective:

Current stimulation strategies for cochlear implants (CIs) use relatively high pulse rates to encode the channel-specific temporal envelope of speech sounds. This projects will combine psychophysical and auditory nerve response measures to build a model that allows to select perceptually relevant stimulation pulses and discard irrelevant pulses. The hypothesis will be tested that removing irrelevant pulses reduces the amount of within- and across-channel temporal interference and improves the access to timing cues (temporal pitch and interaural time differences) and, as a consequence, speech understanding under conditions of informational masking.