Effects of attention on the speech reception threshold and pupil response of people with impaired and normal hearing.

Effects of attention on the speech reception threshold and pupil response of people with impaired and normal hearing. Hear Res. 2017 Aug 30;354:56-63 Authors: Koelewijn T, Versfeld NJ, Kramer SE Abstract For people with hearing difficulties, following a conversation in a noisy environment requires substantial cognitive processing, which is often perceived as effortful. Recent studies with normal hearing (NH) listeners showed that the pupil dilation response, a measure of cognitive processing load, is affected by 'attention related' processes. How these processes affect the pupil dilation response for hearing impaired (HI) listeners remains unknown. Therefore, the current study investigated the effect of auditory attention on various pupil response parameters for 15 NH adults (median age 51 yrs.) and 15 adults with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss (median age 52 yrs.). Both groups listened to two different sentences presented simultaneously, one to each ear and partially masked by stationary noise. Participants had to repeat either both sentences or only one, for which they had to divide or focus attention, respectively. When repeating one sentence, the target sentence location (left or right) was either randomized or blocked across trials, which in the latter case allowed for a better spatial focus of attention. The speech-to-noise ratio was adjusted to yield about 50% sentences correct for each task and condition. NH part...
Source: Hearing Research - Category: Audiology Authors: Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research