Listening Effort in Cochlear Implant Users
University of Minnesota
Summary
People with hearing loss experience extra effort when listening, which can lead to severe psychological barriers to communication and social participation. Listening effort can lead to fatigue, mental strain, burnout, medical sick leave, and the need for increased time to recover from regular daily activities. This proposal aims to understand effort changes on a moment-to-moment basis during listening, how long the effort lasts, and how the planning and execution of effort is impacted by the experience of using a cochlear implant.
Description
General methods: Speech recognition testing: The main experimental task is listening to speech in the free field in a sound-attenuated booth. Traditional speech recognition consists of hearing and repeating sentences, and these studies will vary on that general theme with modifications to suit the specific aims of the project. For example, some stimuli are repeated twice before verbal response, and some are questions and answers rather than declarative sentences. The investigators have developed the stimuli specifically for each experiment, always avoiding emotionally evocative stimuli since…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 18–75 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria: To be eligible for this study, a participant must: * Be an adult between the age of 18 to 75 years * Have had normal hearing and speech/language development as a young child * For younger NH listeners: have normal audiometric thresholds below 25 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 8000 Hz * for cochlear implant listeners: at least 6 months experience with a cochlear implant * For older (55+ years) age-matched listeners with no cochlear implant: normal audiometric thresholds below 25 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 2000 Hz and thresholds below 35 dB HL (hearing level…
Interventions
- Behavioralsentence manipulations
Auditory stimuli (sentences) are manipulated to have key words masked by noise, or to have prosody (pitch contour) manipulated to be consistent or inconsistent with a specific inferred meaning. Participants repeat the sentences while a camera tracks changes in their eye movements and changes in pupil dilation.
Location
- University of MinnesotaMinneapolis, Minnesota