Neural indices of listening effort in noisy environments.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Dimitrijevic A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6677804 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Neural indices of listening effort in noisy environments.
Dimitrijevic Andrew A Smith Michael L ML Kadis Darren S DS Moore David R DR
Scientific reports 20190802 1
Listening in a noisy environment is challenging for individuals with normal hearing and can be a significant burden for those with hearing impairment. The extent to which this burden is alleviated by a hearing device is a major, unresolved issue for rehabilitation. Here, we found adult users of cochlear implants (CIs) self-reported listening effort during a speech-in-noise task that was positively related to alpha oscillatory activity in the left inferior frontal cortex, canonical Broca's area, ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Comprehending the teacher's message when other students are chatting is challenging. Even though the sound environment is the same for a whole class, differences in individual performance can be observed, which might depend on a variety of personal factors and their specific interaction with the listening condition. This study was designed to explore the role of individual characteristics (reading comprehension, inhibitory control, noise sensitivity) when primary school children perform a listening comprehension task in the presence of a two-talker masker. The results indicated that this type of noise impairs children's accuracy, effort, and motivation during the task. Its specific impact depended on the level and was modulated by the child's characteristics. In particular, reading comprehension was found to support task accuracy, whereas inhibitory control moderated the effect of listening condition on the two measures of listening effort included in the study (response time and self-ratings), even though with a different pattern of association. A moderation effect of noise sensitivity on perceived listening effort was also observed. Understanding the relationship between individual characteristics and classroom sound environment has practical implications for the acoustic design of spaces promoting students' well-being, and supporting their learning performance.
| S-EPMC10471719 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study was aimed at assessing listening effort (LE) in quiet and in noisy daily life situations, in 481 adults with hearing aids (HAs) and 62 adults with normal hearing, using an Extended version of the Effort Assessment Scale (EEAS). Participants were invited to self-assess their LE in daily life, on a visual analog scale graded from 0 (no effort) to 10. The EEAS's internal structure identified two separate constructs pertaining to LE in quiet and LE in noise, each with good consistency (Cronbach's α > 0.83). A three-factor model explained 12% of the variance of the EEAS scores, with HA experience the most important one, and better ear hearing threshold (averaged across 0.5-4 kHz) and ear asymmetry as the other two factors. The EEAS subscales differed in behavior, with the LE in noise being the most dependent on HA experience, whereas LE in quiet depended more on better ear hearing threshold. In a subgroup of people with 6 months to less than 24 months HA experience, a significant decrease in LE in noise was observed with increasing HA experience (0.26 points decrease per year of HA experience), whereas in a group of people with at least 24 months of HA experience, a small increase in LE in noise was observed. This effect was not mediated by age, nor hearing threshold. The extended Effort Assessment Scale is therefore offering an assessment of both LE in quiet and LE in noise, with different dependence on HA experience and hearing thresholds.
| S-EPMC10265363 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Recent research has demonstrated that pupillometry is a robust measure for quantifying listening effort. However, pupillary responses in listening situations where multiple cognitive functions are engaged and sustained over a period of time remain hard to interpret. This limits our conceptualisation and understanding of listening effort in realistic situations, because rarely in everyday life are people challenged by one task at a time. Therefore, the purpose of this experiment was to reveal the dynamics of listening effort in a sustained listening condition using a word repeat and recall task. Words were presented in quiet and speech-shaped noise at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR): 0dB, 7dB, 14dB and quiet. Participants were presented with lists of 10 words, and required to repeat each word after its presentation. At the end of the list, participants either recalled as many words as possible or moved on to the next list. Simultaneously, their pupil dilation was recorded throughout the whole experiment. When only word repeating was required, peak pupil dilation (PPD) was bigger in 0dB versus other conditions; whereas when recall was required, PPD showed no difference among SNR levels and PPD in 0dB was smaller than repeat-only condition. Baseline pupil diameter and PPD followed different variation patterns across the 10 serial positions within a block for conditions requiring recall: baseline pupil diameter built up progressively and plateaued in the later positions (but shot up when listeners were recalling the previously heard words from memory); PPD decreased at a pace quicker than in repeat-only condition. The current findings demonstrate that additional cognitive load during a speech intelligibility task could disturb the well-established relation between pupillary response and listening effort. Both the magnitude and temporal pattern of task-evoked pupillary response differ greatly in complex listening conditions, urging for more listening effort studies in complex and realistic listening situations.
| S-EPMC7928507 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Listening to speech in noise is effortful, particularly for people with hearing impairment. While it is known that effort is related to a complex interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes, the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms contributing to effortful listening remain unknown. Therefore, a reliable physiological measure to assess effort remains elusive. This study aimed to determine whether pupil dilation and alpha power change, two physiological measures suggested to index listening effort, assess similar processes. Listening effort was manipulated by parametrically varying spectral resolution (16- and 6-channel noise vocoding) and speech reception thresholds (SRT; 50% and 80%) while 19 young, normal-hearing adults performed a speech recognition task in noise. Results of off-line sentence scoring showed discrepancies between the target SRTs and the true performance obtained during the speech recognition task. For example, in the SRT80% condition, participants scored an average of 64.7%. Participants' true performance levels were therefore used for subsequent statistical modelling. Results showed that both measures appeared to be sensitive to changes in spectral resolution (channel vocoding), while pupil dilation only was also significantly related to their true performance levels (%) and task accuracy (i.e., whether the response was correctly or partially recalled). The two measures were not correlated, suggesting they each may reflect different cognitive processes involved in listening effort. This combination of findings contributes to a growing body of research aiming to develop an objective measure of listening effort.
| S-EPMC5536372 | biostudies-other
Project description:ObjectivesEveryday listening environments are filled with competing noise and distractors. Although significant research has examined the effect of competing noise on speech recognition and listening effort, little is understood about the effect of distraction. The framework for understanding effortful listening recognizes the importance of attention-related processes in speech recognition and listening effort; however, it underspecifies the role that they play, particularly with respect to distraction. The load theory of attention predicts that resources will be automatically allocated to processing a distractor, but only if perceptual load in the listening task is low enough. If perceptual load is high (i.e., listening in noise), then resources that would otherwise be allocated to processing a distractor are used to overcome the increased perceptual load and are unavailable for distractor processing. Although there is ample evidence for this theory in the visual domain, there has been little research investigating how the load theory of attention may apply to speech processing. In this study, we sought to measure the effect of distractors on speech recognition and listening effort and to evaluate whether the load theory of attention can be used to understand a listener's resource allocation in the presence of distractors.DesignFifteen adult listeners participated in a monosyllabic words repetition task. Test stimuli were presented in quiet or in competing speech (+5 dB signal-to-noise ratio) and in distractor or no distractor conditions. In conditions with distractors, auditory distractors were presented before the target words on 24% of the trials in quiet and in noise. Percent-correct was recorded as speech recognition, and verbal response time (VRT) was recorded as a measure of listening effort.ResultsA significant interaction was present for speech recognition, showing reduced speech recognition when distractors were presented in the quiet condition but no effect of distractors when noise was present. VRTs were significantly longer when distractors were present, regardless of listening condition.ConclusionsConsistent with the load theory of attention, distractors significantly reduced speech recognition in the low-perceptual load condition (i.e., listening in quiet) but did not impact speech recognition scores in conditions of high perceptual load (i.e., listening in noise). The increases in VRTs in the presence of distractors in both low- and high-perceptual load conditions (i.e., quiet and noise) suggest that the load theory of attention may not apply to listening effort. However, the large effect of distractors on VRT in both conditions is consistent with the previous work demonstrating that distraction-related shifts of attention can delay processing of the target task. These findings also fit within the framework for understanding effortful listening, which proposes that involuntary attentional shifts result in a depletion of cognitive resources, leaving less resources readily available to process the signal of interest; resulting in increased listening effort (i.e., elongated VRT).
| S-EPMC10440215 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Listening effort is a valuable and important notion to measure because it is among the primary complaints of people with hearing loss. It is tempting and intuitive to accept speech intelligibility scores as a proxy for listening effort, but this link is likely oversimplified and lacks actionable explanatory power. This study was conducted to explain the mechanisms of listening effort that are not captured by intelligibility scores, using sentence-repetition tasks where specific kinds of mistakes were prospectively planned or analyzed retrospectively. Effort measured as changes in pupil size among 20 listeners with normal hearing and 19 listeners with cochlear implants. Experiment 1 demonstrates that mental correction of misperceived words increases effort even when responses are correct. Experiment 2 shows that for incorrect responses, listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. A simple taxonomy of error types is provided that is both intuitive and consistent with data from these two experiments. The diversity of errors in these experiments implies that speech perception tasks can be designed prospectively to elicit the mistakes that are more closely linked with effort. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort.
| S-EPMC8287270 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We investigate the process of spin squeezing in a ferromagnetic dipolar spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate under the driven one-axis twisting scheme, with emphasis on the detrimental effect of noisy environments (stray magnetic fields) which completely destroy the spin squeezing. By applying concatenated dynamical decoupling pulse sequences with a moderate bias magnetic field to suppress the effect of the noisy environments, we faithfully reconstruct the spin squeezing process under realistic experimental conditions. Our noise-resistant method is ready to be employed to generate the spin squeezed state in a dipolar spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate and paves a feasible way to the Heisenberg-limit quantum metrology.
| S-EPMC5658406 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A series of our previous studies explored the use of an abstract visual representation of the amplitude envelope cues from target sentences to benefit speech perception in complex listening environments. The purpose of this study was to expand this auditory-visual speech perception to the tactile domain. Twenty adults participated in speech recognition measurements in four different sensory modalities (AO, auditory-only; AV, auditory-visual; AT, auditory-tactile; AVT, auditory-visual-tactile). The target sentences were fixed at 65 dB sound pressure level and embedded within a simultaneous speech-shaped noise masker of varying degrees of signal-to-noise ratios (-7, -5, -3, -1, and 1 dB SNR). The amplitudes of both abstract visual and vibrotactile stimuli were temporally synchronized with the target speech envelope for comparison. Average results showed that adding temporally-synchronized multimodal cues to the auditory signal did provide significant improvements in word recognition performance across all three multimodal stimulus conditions (AV, AT, and AVT), especially at the lower SNR levels of -7, -5, and -3 dB for both male (8-20% improvement) and female (5-25% improvement) talkers. The greatest improvement in word recognition performance (15-19% improvement for males and 14-25% improvement for females) was observed when both visual and tactile cues were integrated (AVT). Another interesting finding in this study is that temporally synchronized abstract visual and vibrotactile stimuli additively stack in their influence on speech recognition performance. Our findings suggest that a multisensory integration process in speech perception requires salient temporal cues to enhance speech recognition ability in noisy environments.
| S-EPMC9630463 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Environmental noise that reduces the probability that animals will detect communicative signals poses a special challenge for long-range communication. The application of signal-detection theory to animal communication lead to the prediction that signals directed at distant receivers in noisy environments will begin with conspicuous "alerting" components to attract the attention of receivers, before delivery of the information-rich portion of the signal. Whether animals actually adopt this strategy is not clear, despite suggestions that alerts might exist in a variety of taxa. By using a combination of behavioral observations and experimental manipulations with robotic lizard "playbacks," we show that free-living territorial Anolis lizards add an "alert" to visual displays when communicating to distant receivers in situations of poor visibility, and that these introductory alerts in turn enhance signal detection in adverse signaling conditions. Our results show that Anolis lizards are able to evaluate environmental conditions that affect the degradation of long-distance signals and adjust their behavior accordingly. This study demonstrates that free-living animals enhance the efficiency of long-range communication through the modulation of signal design and the facultative addition of an alert. Our findings confirm that alert signals are an important strategy for communicating in "noisy" conditions and suggest a reexamination of the existence of alerts in other animals relying on long-range communication.
| S-EPMC2596256 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Perceived listening effort was assessed for a monaural irregular-rhythm detection task while competing signals were presented to the contralateral ear. When speech was the competing signal, listeners reported greater listening effort compared to either contralateral steady-state noise or no competing signal. Behavioral thresholds for irregular-rhythm detection were unaffected by competing speech, indicating that listeners compensated for this competing signal with effortful listening. These results suggest that perceived listening effort may be associated with suppression of task-irrelevant information, even for conditions where informational masking and competition for linguistic processing resources would not be expected.
| S-EPMC3785518 | biostudies-other