Get your ears dancing: Evaluation of a novel training paradigm for posterior auricular muscle contraction in response to auditory stimuli

Abstract

A novel auditory auricular myogenic training paradigm was developed. Ten participants underwent 5 training sessions comprised of a facilitation and skill acquisition phase. Through tones-in-noise tasks and coordinate response measure speech-in-noise tasks, participants trained the intentional and lateralized activation of the posterior auricular muscle to auditory stimuli in a virtual auditory space. Of the 10 participants, 7 were able to obtain some degree of significant improvement in intentional PAM contraction ipsilateral to an auditory stimulus. Correct and reliably lateralized intentional contraction was achieved in 8 participants, but no participant showed a training effect for reflexive posterior auricular muscle activation. Intentional manipulation of the posterior auricular muscle was found to be highly trainable for both magnitude of contraction and lateralization in the majority of participants in as few as 5 exclusively auditory-based training sessions. This study increases the toolkit for training the vestigial auriculomotor neural pathway for novel and complex functional activity.