In this project, Ana Isabel Sanchez Jimenez at the University of Oxford explores how brain training could help people with hearing loss in one ear improve their spatial hearing.
This ability is important for everyday life, helping people stay safe and communicate more effectively in noisy environments.
Project start date: October 2019
Project end date: September 2022
About the project
Spatial hearing allows someone to detect where a sound is coming from, like the direction of an approaching car when crossing the road, or understanding speech in a noisy environment. It involves being able to detect differences in the timing and loudness of sounds between the two ears. This becomes more difficult when a person’s hearing loss is more severe in one ear than the other.
Previous research shows that training can improve someone’s ability to tell where a sound is coming from. However, this research was carried out in a quiet laboratory setting, so we don’t know whether it could also help people to locate sounds in more natural listening environments.
This project aims to understand how the brain adapts to hearing loss in one ear and whether training can help to improve how accurately people with this ‘asymmetric’ hearing loss can locate sounds.
How it works
Ana will investigate whether the changes in the brain that occur in quiet listening conditions also occur under more challenging, noisy listening conditions and whether training can improve the ability to locate sounds when someone has a partial sensorineural hearing loss in one ear.
Ana will measure how accurately people can locate sounds in a realistic and noisy environment. The participants will wear one ear plug (to simulate a hearing loss) while they do daily training. Ana will assess whether their ability to tell where a sound is coming from improves after training, as happens in quiet listening conditions.
What we’ve learned so far
The study showed that losing hearing in one ear makes it harder to tell where sounds are coming from, but with regular training, this ability can improve quickly and recover to near normal. Importantly, these improvements were also seen in more realistic, noisy situations, not just quiet lab settings.
The research also found that the brain adapts by relying more on the better‑hearing ear, and that this learning can last over time, making it easier to adjust again if hearing changes in the future.
How will this research benefit people with hearing loss?
These findings suggest that targeted training could help people adapt to hearing loss in one ear, including those adjusting to hearing aids or cochlear implants.
Because the benefits extend to noisy, everyday environments, this approach could improve safety, communication and independence, while supporting the development of new rehabilitation strategies that make use of the brain’s natural ability to adapt.
About the researcher
Dr Ana Isabel Sanchez Jimenez completed her PhD in 2022. Her studentship in Professor Andrew King’s lab at the University of Oxford began in 2019 and was fully funded by the Peter Jost Foundation.