The Cost of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cognitive Demands on Auditory Functioning in Older Adults With Normal Hearing or Using Hearing Aids

Conclusions: This study showed that, irrespective of the hearing status of the listener, speech performance was not affected by the amount of extrinsic cognitive demands, but was worse and required more effort under conditions with a more negative SNR. Also, increasing the extrinsic cognitive demands resulted in lower performance on one of the secondary tasks, suggesting that more complex listening environments require more effort. Although adults with NH outperformed HA users on speech understanding and auditory localization, the two groups did not differ with respect to secondary task costs.
Source: Ear and Hearing - Category: Audiology Tags: Research Article Source Type: research