Susceptibility to impulsive noise: A review of early studies

The maximum tolerable exposures returned by damage-risk criteria for impulsive noise are often designed to protect the population to the 5th percentile most susceptible exposed person. To protect human research volunteers, estimates of this location on the distribution must be estimated rather than measured directly. In this presentation, we present threshold shift distributions from human studies of threshold shifts prior to about 1980. Sample sizes ranged in these studies ranged between 5 and 66 ears. The threshold shift distributions implied by these data are compared against assumptions made in more recent damage-risk criteria for impulsive noise. Implications for the development and/or improvement of damage-risk criteria will be discussed.