Researchers Test Hearing by Looking at Dilation of People's Eyes
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:
Researchers test hearing by looking at dilation of people's eyes:
University of Oregon neuroscientists have shown that a person's hearing can be assessed by measuring dilation of the pupils in eyes, a method that is as sensitive as traditional methods of testing hearing.
The approach is being developed as a potential way to test hearing in babies, young adults with developmental disabilities and adults suffering from a stroke or illness -- populations where direct responses are not possible.
In the experiments, changes in pupil size of 31 adults were monitored with eye-tracking technology for about three seconds as they performed a traditional tone-based hearing test while also staring at an object on a monitor. Dilation in all subjects matched their subsequent push-button responses, when prompted by a question mark on the screen, signifying whether or not a tone was heard.
The project, detailed in an open-access paper published online last month in the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, was inspired more than a decade ago when the study's lead author, Avinash Singh Bala, noticed changes in the pupils of barn owls in response to unexpected noises in their environment.
Avinash D. S. Bala, Elizabeth A. Whitchurch, Terry T. Takahashi. Human Auditory Detection and Discrimination Measured with the Pupil Dilation Response. Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2019; DOI: 10.1007/s10162-019-00739-x
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