Authors : H.S. Sanjay, S. Bhargavi and N. Thangadurai
Abstract: Hearing problems are one of the most common issues in human beings. While there are conventional tests existing to validate the hearing ability of individuals, these tests simply fail to assess the variations in the hearing perception of normal subjects and are only useful for clinical diagnosis in case of pathologically affected subjects. The present study emphasizes on one such approach where subjects of no known auditory pathological history with variations in age and sex are subjected to Audiometry Test (AT) and then to Gap Detection Test (GDT). While the AT failed to demonstrate any kind of variations with respect to age and sex, the gap detection test was able to successfully differentiate between these parameters proving the Gap Detection Threshold (GDTh) to be a better parameter to assess the variations in age and sex for normal subjects. About 44 subjects, both males and females of age group 20-30, 30-40 and 40-50 years were considered for this experiment. The results showed that the GDTh decreases with age and also that the GDTh is better in males as compared to females in case of normal subjects and hence GDT can be used to assess the hearing perception oriented variations in subjects who are not affected by any auditory pathology.
H.S. Sanjay, S. Bhargavi and N. Thangadurai, 2017. Assessment of Psychophysical Variations in Human Beings with the Aid of Audiometry and Gap Detection Tests. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 12: 7351-7357.