Listening effort during an auditory vigilance task (Golob et al., 2024)

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posted on 2024-08-08, 19:34 authored by Edward J. Golob, Ricardo C. Olayo, Denver M. Y. Brown, Jeffrey R. Mock

Purpose: Listening effort is a broad construct, and there is no consensus on how to subdivide listening effort into dimensions. This project focuses on the subjective experience of effortful listening and tests if cognitive workload, mental fatigue, and mood are interrelated dimensions.

Method: Two online studies tested young adults (n = 74 and n = 195) and measured subjective workload, fatigue (subscales of fatigue and energy), and mood (subscales of positive and negative mood) before and after a challenging listening task. In the listening effort task, participants responded to intermittent 1-kHz target tones in continuous white noise for approximately 12 min.

Results: Correlations and principal component analysis showed that fatigue and mood were distinct but interrelated constructs that weakly correlated with workload. Effortful listening provoked increased fatigue and decreased energy and positive mood yet did not influence negative mood or workload.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that self-reported listening effort has multiple dimensions that can have different responses to the same effortful listening episode. The results can help guide evidence-based development of clinical listening effort tests and may reveal mechanisms for how listening effort relates to quality of life in those with hearing impairment.

Supplemental Material S1. Subjective workload vs. listening demand (signal/noise ratio) in Study 1 (A) and Study 2 (B) that included participants who rated the task as 0 or 100% effort at all signal/noise ratios. In Study 1, a repeated-measures ANOVA on listening demand (5) was significant, F(2.279, 221.030) = 127.750, p < .001, η_p² = .568, and was well-fit by a linear contrast, t(388) = –22.584, p < .001. In Study 2, a 2 (time) × 5 (listening demand) ANOVA test also had a significant effect of listening demand, F(1.593, 372.702) = 426.879, p < .001, η_p² = .646, and was well-fit by a linear contrast, t(936) = –41.263, p < .001. There was a nonsignificant trend toward greater workload after the auditory PVT, p = .074. Error bars = SEM.

Golob, E. J., Olayo, R. C., Brown, D. M. Y., & Mock, J. R. (2024). Relations among multiple dimensions of self-reported listening effort in response to an auditory psychomotor vigilance task. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(9), 3217–3231. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00465