Effects of age and task difficulty on ERP responses to novel sounds presented during a speech-perception-in-noise test

The P300 Auditory Evoked Potential: A Physiological Measure of the Engagement of Cognitive Systems Contributing to Listening Effort?

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to explore the potential of the P300 (P3b) as a physiological measure of the engagement of cognitive systems contributing to listening effort.

DESIGN

Nineteen right-handed young adults (mean age: 24.79 years) and 20 right-handed older adults (mean age: 58.90 years) with age-appropriate hearing were included. The P300 was recorded at Fz, Cz, and Pz using a two-stimulus oddball paradigm with the Flemish monosyllabic numbers "one" and "three" as standard and deviant stimuli, respectively. This oddball paradigm was conducted in three listening conditions, varying in listening demand: one quiet and two noisy listening conditions (+4 and -2 dB signal to noise ratio [SNR]). At each listening condition, physiological, behavioral, and subjective tests of listening effort were administered. P300 amplitude and latency served as a potential physiological measure of the engagement of cognitive systems contributing to listening effort. In addition, the mean reaction time to respond to the deviant stimuli was used as a behavioral listening effort measurement. Last, subjective listening effort was administered through a visual analog scale. To assess the effects of listening condition and age group on each of these measures, linear mixed models were conducted. Correlation coefficients were calculated to determine the relationship between the physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures.

RESULTS

P300 amplitude and latency, mean reaction time, and subjective scores significantly increased as the listening condition became more taxing. Moreover, a significant group effect was found for all physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures, favoring young adults. Last, no clear relationships between the physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures were found.

CONCLUSIONS

The P300 was considered a physiological measure of the engagement of cognitive systems contributing to listening effort. Because advancing age is associated with hearing loss and cognitive decline, more research is needed on the effects of all these variables on the P300 to further explore its usefulness as a listening effort measurement for research and clinical purposes.

The Involvement of Listening Effort in Explaining Bilingual Listening Under Adverse Listening Conditions

The current review examines listening effort to uncover how it is implicated in bilingual performance under adverse listening conditions. Various measures of listening effort, including physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures, have been employed to examine listening effort in bilingual children and adults. Adverse listening conditions, stemming from environmental factors, as well as factors related to the speaker or listener, have been examined. The existing literature, although relatively limited to date, points to increased listening effort among bilinguals in their nondominant second language (L2) compared to their dominant first language (L1) and relative to monolinguals. Interestingly, increased effort is often observed even when speech intelligibility remains unaffected. These findings emphasize the importance of considering listening effort alongside speech intelligibility. Building upon the insights gained from the current review, we propose that various factors may modulate the observed effects. These include the particular measure selected to examine listening effort, the characteristics of the adverse condition, as well as factors related to the particular linguistic background of the bilingual speaker. Critically, further research is needed to better understand the impact of these factors on listening effort. The review outlines avenues for future research that would promote a comprehensive understanding of listening effort in bilingual individuals.

Age-related differences in bottom-up and top-down attention: Insights from EEG and MEG

Attention operates through top‐down and bottom‐up processes, and a balance between these processes is crucial for daily tasks. Imperilling such balance could explain ageing‐associated attentional problems such as exacerbated distractibility. In this study, we aimed to characterize this enhanced distractibility by investigating the impact of ageing upon event‐related components associated with top‐down and bottom‐up attentional processes. MEG and EEG data were acquired from 14 older and 14 younger healthy adults while performing a task that conjointly evaluates top‐down and bottom‐up attention. Event‐related components were analysed on sensor and source levels. In comparison with the younger group, the older mainly displayed (1) reduced target anticipation processes (reduced CMV), (2) increased early target processing (larger P50 but smaller N1) and (3) increased processing of early distracting sounds (larger N1 but reduced P3a), followed by a (4) prolonged reorientation towards the main task (larger RON). Taken together, our results suggest that the enhanced distractibility in ageing could stem from top‐down deficits, in particular from reduced inhibitory and reorientation processes.

Persistence of the "Moving Things Are Alive" Heuristic into Adulthood: Evidence from EEG

Although a growing number of studies indicate that simple strategies, intuitions, or cognitive shortcuts called heuristics can persistently interfere with scientific reasoning in physics and chemistry, the persistence of heuristics related to learning biology is less known. In this study, we investigate the persistence of the "moving things are alive" heuristic into adulthood with 28 undergraduate students who were asked to select between two images, one of which one represented a living thing, while their electroencephalographic signals were recorded. Results show that N2 and LPP event-related potential components, often associated with tasks requiring inhibitory control, are higher in counterintuitive trials (i.e., in trials including moving things not alive or nonmoving things alive) compared with intuitive ones. To our knowledge, these findings represent the first neurocognitive evidence that the "moving things are alive" heuristic persists into adulthood and that overcoming this heuristic might require inhibitory control. Potential implications for life science education are discussed.

Tension Experience Induced By Nested Structures In Music

Tension experience is the basis for music emotion. In music, discrete elements are always organized into complex nested structures to convey emotion. However, the processing of music tension in the nested structure remains unknown. The present study investigated the tension experience induced by the nested structure and the underlying neural mechanisms, using a continuous tension rating task and electroencephalography (EEG) at the same time. Thirty musicians listened to music chorale sequences with non-nested, singly nested and doubly nested structures and were required to rate their real-time tension experience. Behavioral data indicated that the tension experience induced by the nested structure had more fluctuations than the non-nested structure, and the difference was mainly exhibited in the process of tension induction rather than tension resolution. However, the EEG data showed that larger late positive components (LPCs) were elicited by the ending chords in the nested structure compared with the non-nested structure, reflecting the difference in cognitive integration for long-distance structural dependence. The discrepancy between resolution experience and neural responses revealed the non-parallel relations between emotion and cognition. Furthermore, the LPC elicited by the doubly nested structure showed a smaller scalp distribution than the singly nested structure, indicating the more difficult processing of the doubly nested structure. These findings revealed the dynamic tension experience induced by the nested structure and the influence of nested type, shedding new light on the relationship between structure and tension in music.

Effect of Speech Degradation and Listening Effort in Reverberating and Noisy Environments Given N400 Responses

Background and Objectives

In distracting listening conditions, individuals need to pay extra attention to selectively listen to the target sounds. To investigate the amount of listening effort required in reverberating and noisy backgrounds, a semantic mismatch was examined.

Subjects and Methods

Electroencephalography was performed in 18 voluntary healthy participants using a 64-channel system to obtain N400 latencies. They were asked to listen to sounds and see letters in 2 reverberated×2 noisy paradigms (i.e., Q-0 ms, Q-2000 ms, 3 dB-0 ms, and 3 dB-2000 ms). With auditory-visual pairings, the participants were required to answer whether the auditory primes and letter targets did or did not match.

Results

Q-0 ms revealed the shortest N400 latency, whereas the latency was significantly increased at 3 dB-2000 ms. Further, Q-2000 ms showed approximately a 47 ms delayed latency compared to 3 dB-0 ms. Interestingly, the presence of reverberation significantly increased N400 latencies. Under the distracting conditions, both noise and reverberation involved stronger frontal activation.

Conclusions

The current distracting listening conditions could interrupt the semantic mismatch processing in the brain. The presence of reverberation, specifically a 2000 ms delay, necessitates additional mental effort, as evidenced in the delayed N400 latency and the involvement of the frontal sources in this study.

Top-down modulation of neural envelope tracking: The interplay with behavioral, self-report and neural measures of listening effort

When listening to natural speech, our brain activity tracks the slow amplitude modulations of speech, also called the speech envelope. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated that this neural envelope tracking can be affected by top-down processes. The present study was designed to examine if neural envelope tracking is modulated by the effort that a person expends during listening. Five measures were included to quantify listening effort: two behavioral measures based on a novel dual-task paradigm, a self-report effort measure and two neural measures related to phase synchronization and alpha power. Electroencephalography responses to sentences, presented at a wide range of subject-specific signal-to-noise ratios, were recorded in thirteen young, normal-hearing adults. A comparison of the five measures revealed different effects of listening effort as a function of speech understanding. Reaction times on the primary task and self-reported effort decreased with increasing speech understanding. In contrast, reaction times on the secondary task and alpha power showed a peak-shaped behavior with highest effort at intermediate speech understanding levels. With regard to neural envelope tracking, we found that the reaction times on the secondary task and self-reported effort explained a small part of the variability in theta-band envelope tracking. Speech understanding was found to strongly modulate neural envelope tracking. More specifically, our results demonstrated a robust increase in envelope tracking with increasing speech understanding. The present study provides new insights in the relations among different effort measures and highlights the potential of neural envelope tracking to objectively measure speech understanding in young, normal-hearing adults.

Effects of Task Difficulty on Neural Processes Underlying Semantics: An Event-Related Potentials Study

Purpose Improving the ability to listen efficiently in noisy environments is a critical goal for hearing rehabilitation. However, understanding of the impact of difficult listening conditions on language processing is limited. The current study evaluated the neural processes underlying semantics in challenging listening conditions. Method Thirty adults with normal hearing completed an auditory sentence processing task in 4-talker babble. Event-related brain potentials were elicited by the final word in high- or low-context sentences, where the final word was either highly expected or not expected, followed by a 4-alternative forced-choice response with either longer (1,000 ms), middle (700 ms), or shorter (400 ms) response time deadlines (RTDs). Results Behavioral accuracy was reduced, and reactions times were faster for shorter RTDs. N400 amplitudes, reflecting ease of lexical access, were larger when elicited by target words in low-context sentences followed by shorter compared with longer RTDs. Conclusions These results reveal that more neural resources are allocated for semantic processing/lexical access when listening difficulty increases. Differences between RTDs may reflect increased attentional allocation for shorter RTDs. These findings suggest that situational listening demands can impact the demands for cognitive resources engaged in language processing, which could significantly impact listener experiences across environments.

Physiological methods as indexes of listening effort measurement: an integrative literature review

ABSTRACT Purpose: to review the scientific literature and present existing instruments and methods for the objective assessment of the listening effort in normal hearing individuals worldwide. Methods: a literature integrative review whose purpose was to gather and summarize the scientific knowledge regarding the objective methods theme for measuring the listening effort, developed through the search of articles in specialized national and international journals, in the English and Portuguese languages, available in the databases: PUBMED, Cochrane Library, LILACS and SCIELO. Results: 18 articles which used physiological methods to measure the listening effort in individuals with normal hearing were reviewed. The main findings described in those articles refer to the author(s) and purpose(s) of the research, country where the research was conducted, casuistry, physiological method used and results. Conclusion: there is no consensus among the researchers about the best physiological method to measure this parameter, that is, this effort in the speech perception tasks, although the level of skin conductance is considered the most accurate measure to date.

Effects of Hearing Impairment and Hearing Aid Amplification on Listening Effort: A Systematic Review

OBJECTIVES

To undertake a systematic review of available evidence on the effect of hearing impairment and hearing aid amplification on listening effort. Two research questions were addressed: Q1) does hearing impairment affect listening effort? and Q2) can hearing aid amplification affect listening effort during speech comprehension?

DESIGN

English language articles were identified through systematic searches in PubMed, EMBASE, Cinahl, the Cochrane Library, and PsycINFO from inception to August 2014. References of eligible studies were checked. The Population, Intervention, Control, Outcomes, and Study design strategy was used to create inclusion criteria for relevance. It was not feasible to apply a meta-analysis of the results from comparable studies. For the articles identified as relevant, a quality rating, based on the 2011 Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation Working Group guidelines, was carried out to judge the reliability and confidence of the estimated effects.

RESULTS

The primary search produced 7017 unique hits using the keywords: hearing aids OR hearing impairment AND listening effort OR perceptual effort OR ease of listening. Of these, 41 articles fulfilled the Population, Intervention, Control, Outcomes, and Study design selection criteria of: experimental work on hearing impairment OR hearing aid technologies AND listening effort OR fatigue during speech perception. The methods applied in those articles were categorized into subjective, behavioral, and physiological assessment of listening effort. For each study, the statistical analysis addressing research question Q1 and/or Q2 was extracted. In seven articles more than one measure of listening effort was provided. Evidence relating to Q1 was provided by 21 articles that reported 41 relevant findings. Evidence relating to Q2 was provided by 27 articles that reported 56 relevant findings. The quality of evidence on both research questions (Q1 and Q2) was very low, according to the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation Working Group guidelines. We tested the statistical evidence across studies with nonparametric tests. The testing revealed only one consistent effect across studies, namely that listening effort was higher for hearing-impaired listeners compared with normal-hearing listeners (Q1) as measured by electroencephalographic measures. For all other studies, the evidence across studies failed to reveal consistent effects on listening effort.

CONCLUSION

In summary, we could only identify scientific evidence from physiological measurement methods, suggesting that hearing impairment increases listening effort during speech perception (Q1). There was no scientific, finding across studies indicating that hearing aid amplification decreases listening effort (Q2). In general, there were large differences in the study population, the control groups and conditions, and the outcome measures applied between the studies included in this review. The results of this review indicate that published listening effort studies lack consistency, lack standardization across studies, and have insufficient statistical power. The findings underline the need for a common conceptual framework for listening effort to address the current shortcomings.