RELCOM: Recovery from Effortful Listening and Communication
Abstract:
When people talk at a cocktail party, selective auditory attention helps them to segregate acoustic targets from interferers. Listening among competing interferers is, however, effortful, especially for people with hearing disability. Currently, deficits in attentional processing due to effortful listening are not implemented in standard audiological methods. The current methods are thus insufficient at predicting the effectiveness of communication in real-life settings. RELCOM will test the hypothesis that effortful listening causes a short-term depletion of auditory attention due to reduction in available cognitive resources. A new protocol will be developed enabling the capture of the attention depletion magnitude and the temporal profile of the recovery from a task-induced listening effort. In that new protocol, auditory attention will be probed using an auditory streaming paradigm shortly before and after a real-life task of effortful listening. The probing will consider objective measures such as pupillometry and electroencephalography, both combined with behavioral performance. Listening effort will be induced in a conversation that takes place in a virtual acoustic reality controlled by real-time signal processing creating realistic acoustic conditions. This research is essential for future audiological applications because the obtained measures have potential to guide individualization of hearing technologies and acoustic environments with respect to listener’s own needs or disabilities.
