No Sound Sounds as Loud as the One You are Trying Not To Hear: The Delayed Costs of Suppressed (Tinnitus) Sounds

The project focuses on an avoidant attentional strategy (i.e., suppression) for dealing with the intrusiveness of task-irrelevant sounds. This line of work is most relevant for tinnitus, i.e. the experience of sounds without an identified source. Preliminary observations suggest that the rebound effect of suppression – the re-emergence of the suppressed experience over time – observed in other domains has an analog in the experience of sounds. This finding will be explored in a series of laboratory experiments in which tinnitus will be mimicked in normal hearing participants.

Research principal: Linköping University