PP1324 - Online Measurement of Auditory Processing in Migraineurs and People with Typical Hearing

Purpose: 

The primary purpose of this study is to (a) design and test a virtual version of duration discrimination and auditory memory tests commonly used in face-to-face evaluations of listening abilities.  (b) determine if performance on these virtual tests is related to self-disclosed experience with migraines. One limitation of previous work on migraine and listening abilities is limited sample sizes (between 9 and 28 subjects). If controlled psychoacoustic measures of listening abilities were accessible from a computer with internet access, the power of these studies could be greatly enhanced, and our understanding of auditory processing abilities and their relation to neurologic conditions such as migraine could be improved. This will allow us to (c) confirm findings from previous studies of Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) and migraineurs in a larger population. While there are reports in the literature of tablet-based assessments for in person testing (e.g., Barker & Purdy, 2016), to date, there have been no peer-reviewed reports of performance on auditory processing tasks in tele-health context. This proposed study has been constructed to assess listening abilities (specifically temporal discrimination and auditory sequencing) within an online Qualtrics survey format.

Methods:

The entirety of this study is conducted virtually through the platform Qualtrics (45 minutes). Participants are asked to complete an initial 3-question screener of exclusion. The remaining participants complete a demographic questionnaire, online hearing screening, and Migraine Questionnaire is completed for those who qualify. Digital formats of APD tests for auditory memory and duration discrimination were developed using Adobe Audition including practice sets that mimic the main survey to ensure understanding of instructions.

Part 1- Auditory memory task: tests the listener's ability to detect up to three brief silent periods in 6-second samples of white noise at a comfortable volume (modeled after Musiek et al. (2005)). The practice set includes 10 items binaurally excluding the more difficult lengths. The participant is asked to listen for these silent periods and identify the amount heard in each sample. Each silent period could last for 1/10 possible durations (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 ms), and was pseudorandomized using a random number generator. Each ear was performed independently (a total of 40 trials per ear with 60 total silent periods per ear).

Part 2- Duration Discrimination: requires the participant to listen to three consecutive 1000 Hz tones of long (500 ms) or short (250 ms) duration, and identify the pattern heard (modeled after Musiek et al. (1990)). 12 practice questions- presented binaurally, the remainder of the test was ear independent. After listening to the stimulus, participants choose the correct sequence from a list of 8 available choices. There are a total of 24 trials per ear.



Results:

Participants aged 18-65 were grouped by either Migraineur or Non-Migraineur (control group). Descriptive statistics will be performed including an analysis of variance across the groups of non-migraineurs, episodic, and chronic migraineurs. We hypothesize significant differences across subject groups and handedness, and no significant differences between our measures and published APD testing norms.