Improved Neural Coding of ITD with Bilateral Cochlear Implants by Introducing Short Inter-pulse Intervals

AbstractBilateral cochlear implant (CI) users have poor perceptual sensitivity to interaural time differences (ITDs), which limits their ability to localize sounds and understand speech in noisy environments. This is especially true for high-rate (>  300 pps) periodic pulse trains, which are used as carriers in CI processors. Here, we investigate a novel stimulation strategy in which extra pulses are added to high-rate periodic pulse trains to introduce short inter-pulse intervals (SIPIs). We hypothesized that SIPIs can improve neural ITD se nsitivity similarly to the effect observed by randomly jittering IPIs (Hancock et al., J. Neurophysiol. 108:714–28,2012). To test this hypothesis, we measured ITD sensitivity of single units in the inferior colliculus (IC) of unanesthetized rab...

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