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Objective Assessment of Listening Effort: Coregistration of Pupillometry and EEG.

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Miles K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5536372 | biostudies-other | 2017 Jan-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Project description:Current evidence demonstrates that even though some non-native listeners can achieve native-like performance for speech perception tasks in quiet, the presence of a background noise is much more detrimental to speech intelligibility for non-native compared to native listeners. Even when performance is equated across groups, it is likely that greater listening effort is required for non-native listeners. Importantly, the added listening effort might result in increased fatigue and a reduced ability to successfully perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Task-evoked pupil responses have been demonstrated to be a reliable measure of cognitive effort and can be useful in clarifying those aspects. In this study we compared the pupil response for 23 native English speakers and 27 Italian speakers of English as a second language. Speech intelligibility was tested for sentences presented in quiet and in background noise at two performance levels that were matched across groups. Signal-to-noise levels corresponding to these sentence intelligibility levels were pre-determined using an adaptive intelligibility task. Pupil response was significantly greater in non-native compared to native participants across both intelligibility levels. Therefore, for a given intelligibility level, a greater listening effort is required when listening in a second language in order to understand speech in noise. Results also confirmed that pupil response is sensitive to speech intelligibility during language comprehension, in line with previous research. However, contrary to our predictions, pupil response was not differentially modulated by intelligibility levels for native and non-native listeners. The present study corroborates that pupillometry can be deemed as a valid measure to be used in speech perception investigation, because it is sensitive to differences both across participants, such as listener type, and across conditions, such as variations in the level of speech intelligibility. Importantly, pupillometry offers us the possibility to uncover differences in listening effort even when those do not emerge in the performance level of individuals.

Project description:Purpose Listening effort is quickly becoming an important metric for assessing speech perception in less-than-ideal situations. However, the relationship between the construct of listening effort and the measures used to assess it remains unclear. We compared two measures of listening effort: a cognitive dual task and a physiological pupillometry task. We sought to investigate the relationship between these measures of effort and whether engaging effort impacts speech accuracy. Method In Experiment 1, 30 participants completed a dual task and a pupillometry task that were carefully matched in stimuli and design. The dual task consisted of a spoken word recognition task and a visual match-to-sample task. In the pupillometry task, pupil size was monitored while participants completed a spoken word recognition task. Both tasks presented words at three levels of listening difficulty (unmodified, eight-channel vocoding, and four-channel vocoding) and provided response feedback on every trial. We refined the pupillometry task in Experiment 2 (n = 31); crucially, participants no longer received response feedback. Finally, we ran a new group of subjects on both tasks in Experiment 3 (n = 30). Results In Experiment 1, accuracy in the visual task decreased with increased signal degradation in the dual task, but pupil size was sensitive to accuracy and not vocoding condition. After removing feedback in Experiment 2, changes in pupil size were predicted by listening condition, suggesting the task was now sensitive to engaged effort. Both tasks were sensitive to listening difficulty in Experiment 3, but there was no relationship between the tasks and neither task predicted speech accuracy. Conclusions Consistent with previous work, we found little evidence for a relationship between different measures of listening effort. We also found no evidence that effort predicts speech accuracy, suggesting that engaging more effort does not lead to improved speech recognition. Cognitive and physiological measures of listening effort are likely sensitive to different aspects of the construct of listening effort. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16455900.

Project description:ObjectiveThe aim of the present study was to investigate the pupillary response to word identification in cochlear implant (CI) patients. Authors hypothesized that when task difficulty (i.e., addition of background noise) increased, pupil dilation markers such as the peak dilation or the latency of the peak dilation would increase in CI users, as already observed in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects.MethodsPupillometric measures in 10 CI patients were combined to standard speech recognition scores used to evaluate CI outcomes, namely, speech audiometry in quiet and in noise at +10 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The main outcome measures of pupillometry were mean pupil dilation, maximal pupil dilation, dilation latency, and mean dilation during return to baseline or retention interval. Subjective hearing quality was evaluated by means of one self-reported fatigue questionnaire, and the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities (SSQ) of Hearing scale.ResultsAll pupil dilation data were transformed to percent change in event-related pupil dilation (ERPD, %). Analyses show that the peak amplitudes for both mean pupil dilation and maximal pupil dilation were higher during the speech-in-noise test. Mean peak dilation was measured at 3.47 ± 2.29% noise vs. 2.19 ± 2.46 in quiet and maximal peak value was detected at 9.17 ± 3.25% in noise vs. 8.72 ± 2.93% in quiet. Concerning the questionnaires, the mean pupil dilation during the retention interval was significantly correlated with the spatial subscale score of the SSQ Hearing scale [r(8) = -0.84, p = 0.0023], and with the global score [r(8) = -0.78, p = 0.0018].ConclusionThe analysis of pupillometric traces, obtained during speech audiometry in quiet and in noise in CI users, provided interesting information about the different processes engaged in this task. Pupillometric measures could be indicative of listening difficulty, phoneme intelligibility, and were correlated with general hearing experience as evaluated by the SSQ of Hearing scale. These preliminary results show that pupillometry constitutes a promising tool to improve objective quantification of CI performance in clinical settings.

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.

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Objective Assessment of Listening Effort: Coregistration of Pupillometry and EEG.

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