Measuring effective detection and localization performance of hearing protection devices
Richard L. McKinley, Eric R. Thompson, Brian D. Simpson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2014
Awareness of the surrounding acoustic environment is essential to the safety of persons. However, the use of hearing protection devices can degrade the ability to detect and localize sounds, particularly quiet sounds. There are ANSI/ASA standards describing methods for measuring attenuation, insertion loss, and speech intelligibility in noise for hearing protection devices, but currently there are no standard methods to measure the effects of hearing protection devices on localization and/or detection performance. A method for measuring the impact of hearing protectors on effective detection and localization performance has been developed at AFRL. This method measures the response time in an aurally aided visual search task where the presentation levels are varied. The performance with several level-dependent hearing protection devices will be presented.