Many studies have shown that acoustic noise can affect the perception of visual or acoustic stimuli (Peele, 2014).
This suggests that subjects may perceive acoustic stimuli differently because of varying acoustic noise in different MRI settings.
Although noise is often present during all experimental conditions, it still influences the result, because there may be interactions between acoustic noise and the individual perception of particular stimuli. For an accurate interpretation of the results of acoustic stimuli perception during MRI sequences it is therefore important to know how the individual perceives different acoustic stimuli in general.
To learn more about the extent of this problem in auditory neuroscience, we will investigate if and which frequencies of acoustic stimuli are inaudible during various MRI settings using audiometry.
*Peelle, J. E. (2014) Methodological challenges and solutions in auditory functional magnetic resonance imaging. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 8, 253.*