Impact of Presentation Order on Pitch Ranking Sensitivity in Cochlear Implant Users and Normal-Hearing Listeners and Its Mitigation.

Accurate pitch perception in cochlear implants (CIs) remains challenging, making psychophysical measures susceptible to procedural biases. In unilateral pitch ranking, subjects judge which of two successive stimuli is higher in pitch, typically yielding electrode order roughly consistent with tonoto...

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Published in:Trends in Hearing Vol. 30; pp. 1 - 19
Main Authors: Castañeda González, Carmen Marie, Huber, Manuela, Völk, Florian, Teufel, Louis, Djamal, Aulia, Ruan, Linya, Znaidi, Skander, Hemmert, Werner, Karg, Sonja
Format: research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Sage Publications Inc. 7/15/2026
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: 7/15/2026
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      pub: Sage Publications Inc.
      place: Thousand Oaks, California
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        atl: Impact of Presentation Order on Pitch Ranking Sensitivity in Cochlear Implant Users and Normal-Hearing Listeners and Its Mitigation.
      aug:
        au:
          Castañeda González, Carmen Marie
          Huber, Manuela
          Völk, Florian
          Teufel, Louis
          Djamal, Aulia
          Ruan, Linya
          Znaidi, Skander
          Hemmert, Werner
          Karg, Sonja
        affil: Bio-Inspired Information Processing, Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
      sug:
        subj:
          Persons with Hearing Disabilities Psychosocial Factors
          Cochlear Implant
          Pitch Perception Evaluation
          Psychoacoustics
          Acoustic Stimulation
          Human
          Male
          Female
          Adult
          Middle Age
          Validation Studies
          Comparative Studies
          Descriptive Statistics
          Data Analysis Software
          Analysis of Variance
          Repeated Measures
          Post Hoc Analysis
          Hearing Disorders
          Rehabilitation of Persons with Hearing Loss
          Auditory Threshold
          Judgment
          Task Performance and Analysis
          Audiologists
          Funding Source
          Adult: 19-44 years
          Middle Aged: 45-64 years
          Male
          Female
      ab: Accurate pitch perception in cochlear implants (CIs) remains challenging, making psychophysical measures susceptible to procedural biases. In unilateral pitch ranking, subjects judge which of two successive stimuli is higher in pitch, typically yielding electrode order roughly consistent with tonotopy. In our study with 10 MED-EL CI users, each of the 12 electrodes was compared with its three next neighbors. Pitch ranking was influenced by the presentation order of the electrode pairs. To investigate this effect, we tested 9 normal-hearing (NH) listeners using bandpass-filtered noise (6 dB/oct slopes) to approximate current spread during CI stimulation. Comparable performances across CI and NH in all three spacing conditions indicated similar pitch perception difficulty. On average, both groups discriminated 8 of 12 channels based solely on pitch (discriminability via d'), suggesting that 6 dB/oct slopes approximate mean monopolar current spread at the group level. Pitch rankings of adjacent channels exhibited biases. A repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant interaction between presentation order and stimulation site in both groups (CI: p =.003; NH: p <.001): pairs below the stimulus range midpoint were more often reported as descending, whereas pairs above the middle were more often reported as ascending. This asymmetric bias may reflect a context-dependent decision process in which subjects compare the second stimulus to a weighted average of the first and previously presented stimuli. Presentation-order effects were mitigated by testing stimulus pairs in isolation, at the expense of reduced randomization. Our findings highlight the importance of controlling biases to ensure reliable psychophysical measures.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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