On the relationships between otoacoustic emissions, auditory evoked potentials, and psychoacoustical performance

Performance was measured on several common psychoacoustical tasks for about 70 subjects. The measures included simultaneous and temporal masking, masking by tones and by complex sounds, critical bandwidth, release from masking, and detection in the quiet. Also measured were spontaneous, click-evoked, and distortion-product otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) and auditory evoked potentials (AEPs, short and middle latency). Of interest were the correlations between psychoacoustical performance and the various physiological measures as well as any mean differences by sex and by menstrual cycle. Subjects were tested behaviorally in same-sex crews of 4–8 members, and behavioral testing required from 8 to 10 weeks for each crew. Correlation and effect size were the primary measures of interest. Resampling was used to determine implied significance for the various comparisons studied. Some correlations between physiological measures were moderately high, but the correlations between psychoacoustical tasks and the diffe...