Introduction
BILATERAL HEARING LOSS, NEUROSENSORY DEAFNESS
In case of neurosensory deafness, standard interventions often comprise the application of cochlear implants (CI). Although this surgery is indicated for people with bilateral hearing loss, many patients receive only one CI [In this context of impoverished auditory cues, can CI users improve their sound localization skills? In people with normal hearing listening with one ear plugged, sound localization abilities can be trained [In the present study, we leveraged such VR training protocol based on active interactions with the auditory scene. To test the efficacy of this training in 17 UCI users, we contrasted this Spatial training with a control procedure that did not entail processing of spatial features of the sound (i.e., the Non-Spatial training). Crucially, we compared these two VR trainings in a crossover experimental design, which allow us to test the effect of both training paradigms on each participant. Before and after each training paradigm, we tested participants in a head-pointing to sound localization task, which entails different sound positions and requires localizing sounds using a different effector (head instead of hand). In addition, to probe for training benefits when implicit sound localization is required, we tested participants in an audio-visual attention orienting task, in which they were asked to judge the elevation of a visual stimulus while listening a sudden sound.