Right Ear Advantage
Have you ever found yourself sitting somewhere with something going on to your right and something else going on to your left, leading to a quick internal debate about which you should direct your ears’ attention to?
That’s not a cute introductory question to make you want to read this post; it’s the sincere wondering of a girl who has never had that experience. Being profoundly deaf in my right ear, everything my ears (or ear, really) can pay attention to has to be happening on my left.
However, that’s (sort of) besides the point. Speaking entirely from reading and research and not at all from experience, I am guessing most of you haven’t had the experience of consciously choosing which side of you gets your auditory attention. Your brain usually does that for you. And my most recent reading and research discovery suggests that your brain is pretty consistent with its choice.
It has been known since around 1970s that the right ear is more inclined to process speech than the left, due to the fact that for most people the language pathways of the brain are located in the left hemisphere, and auditory processing is mostly contralateral. Follow-up research revealed what is known as the “right ear advantage” in young people (whose cognitive and language processing are still developing). This was discovered through dichotic listening tests, in which two separate pieces of information were played in the ears of subjects, one message to the right ear and one to the left. The subjects would consistently report the right side more effectively than the left, if they reported the left at all. These results were reproduced countless times, so that much appears to be confirmed.
Until recently, it was believed that the right ear advantage essentially disappears after adolescence. No significant differences were observed between reports on right and left sided information for adult subjects. That is, until now. A recent study at Auburn University revealed that the right ear advantage is actually just as observable in adults as it is in adolescents. The change is not in the hearing process, but in the ability to handle increased cognitive demands as a result of more brain development. The simple fix to reproduce the results observed in adolescents for adults was to increase cognitive demands. When demands exceeded auditory memory capacity, subjects relied on the right ear advantage to perform. To learn more about this study, you can find a summary of it on ScienceDaily in the Cited Articles section of this blog, or you can access the abstract through the citation at the end of this post. The study is fairly simple and rather fascinating.
Does this matter to anyone besides audiologists and neuroscientists? As someone with a serious right ear disadvantage, I would like to think so. Research in this area can branch out two revolutionary and important directions: technology development can apply this research to improve sound quality and functionality. If you’ve ever listened to stereo headphones (and pretty much everyone has), you have benefited from this aspect of right ear advantage research. Another direction research could go would be hearing accommodation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it louder for the people in the back: hearing accommodation is more than amplification. For example, my right ear is not picking up any sound. So based on this research, if cognitive demands of a stimulus (such as a professor or a friend trying to carry on a conversation) exceed auditory memory capacity, I don’t have the right ear advantage. My left ear does that job. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it, but it might take more time or more tries to get it. And you could get me the fanciest hearing aids or the world’s biggest ear trumpet or whatever else you might recommend, but it wouldn’t give me that ability. A cochlear implant can’t fix it either, because cochlear implants completely change speech processing, but that’s a matter for another day.
The point is, we can do better. By we, I mean audiology researchers, but I also mean everyone else. If you can’t provide hearing accommodation, try providing patience. Most of the time, it’s just as helpful.
Danielle M Sacchinelli. Does the right ear advantage persist in mature auditory systems when cognitive demand for processing increases? The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142, 2610 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5014556
That’s not a cute introductory question to make you want to read this post; it’s the sincere wondering of a girl who has never had that experience. Being profoundly deaf in my right ear, everything my ears (or ear, really) can pay attention to has to be happening on my left.
However, that’s (sort of) besides the point. Speaking entirely from reading and research and not at all from experience, I am guessing most of you haven’t had the experience of consciously choosing which side of you gets your auditory attention. Your brain usually does that for you. And my most recent reading and research discovery suggests that your brain is pretty consistent with its choice.
It has been known since around 1970s that the right ear is more inclined to process speech than the left, due to the fact that for most people the language pathways of the brain are located in the left hemisphere, and auditory processing is mostly contralateral. Follow-up research revealed what is known as the “right ear advantage” in young people (whose cognitive and language processing are still developing). This was discovered through dichotic listening tests, in which two separate pieces of information were played in the ears of subjects, one message to the right ear and one to the left. The subjects would consistently report the right side more effectively than the left, if they reported the left at all. These results were reproduced countless times, so that much appears to be confirmed.
Until recently, it was believed that the right ear advantage essentially disappears after adolescence. No significant differences were observed between reports on right and left sided information for adult subjects. That is, until now. A recent study at Auburn University revealed that the right ear advantage is actually just as observable in adults as it is in adolescents. The change is not in the hearing process, but in the ability to handle increased cognitive demands as a result of more brain development. The simple fix to reproduce the results observed in adolescents for adults was to increase cognitive demands. When demands exceeded auditory memory capacity, subjects relied on the right ear advantage to perform. To learn more about this study, you can find a summary of it on ScienceDaily in the Cited Articles section of this blog, or you can access the abstract through the citation at the end of this post. The study is fairly simple and rather fascinating.
Does this matter to anyone besides audiologists and neuroscientists? As someone with a serious right ear disadvantage, I would like to think so. Research in this area can branch out two revolutionary and important directions: technology development can apply this research to improve sound quality and functionality. If you’ve ever listened to stereo headphones (and pretty much everyone has), you have benefited from this aspect of right ear advantage research. Another direction research could go would be hearing accommodation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it louder for the people in the back: hearing accommodation is more than amplification. For example, my right ear is not picking up any sound. So based on this research, if cognitive demands of a stimulus (such as a professor or a friend trying to carry on a conversation) exceed auditory memory capacity, I don’t have the right ear advantage. My left ear does that job. That doesn’t mean I can’t do it, but it might take more time or more tries to get it. And you could get me the fanciest hearing aids or the world’s biggest ear trumpet or whatever else you might recommend, but it wouldn’t give me that ability. A cochlear implant can’t fix it either, because cochlear implants completely change speech processing, but that’s a matter for another day.
The point is, we can do better. By we, I mean audiology researchers, but I also mean everyone else. If you can’t provide hearing accommodation, try providing patience. Most of the time, it’s just as helpful.
Danielle M Sacchinelli. Does the right ear advantage persist in mature auditory systems when cognitive demand for processing increases? The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142, 2610 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5014556
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