Hearing loss is common in school-age individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) and extensive in adults. Prior studies with relatively small sample sizes suggest that hearing loss in WS has an early onset and may be progressive, yet the auditory phenotype and the scope of the hearing loss have not been adequately characterized. We used standard audiometric tools: Otoscopy, tympanometry, air-conduc...

Tinnitus is an incapacitating condition commonly affecting cochlear implant (CI) candidates. The aim of this clinical study is to assess the long-term effects of CI treatment in patients with severe-to-profound, sensorineural, unilateral hearing loss (UHL) and incapacitating tinnitus. We performed a prospective Cochlear™ company-sponsored multicentre study in five Spanish centres. Sixteen patie...

A popular model of visual perception states that coarse information (carried by low spatial frequencies) along the dorsal stream is rapidly transmitted to prefrontal and medial temporal areas, activating contextual information from memory, which can in turn constrain detailed input carried by high spatial frequencies arriving at a slower rate along the ventral visual stream, thus facilitating t...

Hearing impaired individuals often have difficulty hearing in noise because of reduced spectral resolution. Previous research suggests that dichotic processing, where information from neighboring frequency regions is sent to opposite ears, may benefit those individuals. However, dichotic processing can degrade binaural cues, reducing spatial release from masking and localization accuracy. In th...

Applications of this new audio zoom system include a “super” hearing aid for people in a crowded noisy environment. Such a hearing aid will have performance far exceeding any standard hearing aid with microphones near the ears. Audio zoom may be very useful for the film industry, to capture better quality audio during on-location filming, and reduce the amount of rerecording and post-production...

We compared normally hearing individuals and congenitally deaf individuals as they monitored moving stimuli either in the periphery or in the center of the visual field. When participants monitored the peripheral visual field, greater recruitment (as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging) of the motion-selective area MT/MST was observed in deaf than in hearing individuals, whereas t...

This paper presents a multimodal framework for the communication between blind and hearing impaired people. The algorithms that are developed are based on the concept of modality replacement, which is the use of information originating from various modalities to compensate for the missing input modality of the system or the users. Spatial information is conveyd in the blind user’s terminal thro...

The study presented here sought to explore the role of auditory cues in the spatial knowledge of blind individuals by examining the relation between the perceived auditory cues and the landscape of a given area and by investigating how blind individuals use auditory cues to create cognitive maps. The findings reveal that several auditory cues characterize the study area and are linked to a numb...

objectives: in september 2002 university of social welfare & rehabilitation sciences established a pilot universal newborn hearing screening program in two crowded maternity hospital in tehran. our objective was to assess the feasibility of implementing universal newborn hearing screening in iran. methods: between september 2002 and march 2004 a total of 7718 newborns were screened for hearing ...