Listening Effort Flashcards
Define Listening Effort
“the cognitive resource requirements necessary for an individual to understand speech” (Desjardins & Doherty, 2013)
What are the different methods used to measure listening effort?
1) Subjective with formal questionnaires such as the SSQ, informal questions, or a rating scale
2) Psychophysiologic measures such as pupil dilation and heart rate (Mackersie & Cones, 2011)
3) Dual-task paradigm (Wu et al., 2014)
Describe the subjective measurements used to measure listening effort.
These measures examine an individual’s perceived difficulty when it comes to speech understanding in a variety of listening conditions
How can subjective measurements be used?
They can be used to obtain reports of ease of listening with hearing aids (Hornsby, 2013)
What are the benefits of using subjective measurements to measure listening effort?
Easy to administer, can be used in the clinic
What are the disadvantages of using subjective measurements to measure listening effort?
Fails to adequately measure the cognitive resources used for speech understanding
Additionally, older adults tend to underestimate their difficulty on subjective reports, decreasing their sensitivity (Gosselin & Gagne, 2011)
Describe the research completed by Kuchinsky et al., 2013 on pupil dilation
Younger and older adults with and without hearing loss experience an increase in pupil dilation as speech understanding decreases.
Individuals with hearing loss have a greater amount of dilation, thus indicating more effort being used in the task compared to normal hearing counterparts.
How sensitive are psychophysiologic measures for measuring listening effort?
They have been shown to relate to task demand. Thus as the task changes in difficulty, the response correlates to this change. (Kuchinsky et al., 2013)
What are the disadvantages of psychophysiological measures?
More complex and expensive to administer in a clinic
Difficult to delineate if the changes observed are the result of increased listening effort of if they are an emotional response.
Explain a dual-task paradigm
In dual-task paradigms, the individual completes a primary speech recognition task as well as a secondary task. The secondary task can be a visual task, or a recall task among many other options, however there currently is no gold standard for what should be used. The individual is instructed to focus on completing the primary task while also completing the secondary task. In other words, a dual-task is a form of multi-tasking.
What is the dual-task paradigm designed to look at?
The cost that one task has on performance on other tasks/areas of function. In other words, it is looking at how two different tasks will compete for the fixed number of cognitive resources available.
What is important to keep in mind when designing a dual-task paradigm?
Don’t want the primary or secondary tasks to be too difficult or too easy otherwise there will be floor and ceiling effects
What are the advantages of using a dual-task paradigm ?
If appropriately designed, adequately measures the individual’s cognitive capacity
What are the disadvantages of using a dual-task paradigm?
No standard for what to use as the secondary task
No paradigm for clinical use
Why do we want to measure listening effort?
To provide appropriate interventions/treatment
