Temporal Processing

Temporal processing issues can affect recognizing and hearing sounds correctly, playing sports, and even telling a story in the correct sequence. TP refers to the perception of time alteration or influence on an audible acoustic event(s). Most sounds, of course, are acoustic events. This is important to everything we do as audiologists in terms of measuring hearing and responses to various kinds of acoustic stimuli.

 

Temporal processing plays an even bigger role in more sophisticated listening tasks. There is both a peripheral and a central influence to temporal processing, more the latter as tasks get more complex.  It is also the latter that will be focused on today.