Incorporating Virtual Reality Agents During a Dichotic Speech Reception Task: Insights From the Heart.

Objectives: Listening effort is moderated by not only task difficulty, but also success importance. In real communication scenarios, success importance varies based upon the social context. However, in the laboratory, it can be challenging to manipulate social context without compromising experimental control.

Combining Cardiovascular and Pupil Features Using k-Nearest Neighbor Classifiers to Assess Task Demand, Social Context, and Sentence Accuracy During Listening.

In daily life, both acoustic factors and social context can affect listening effort investment. In laboratory settings, information about listening effort has been deduced from pupil and cardiovascular responses independently. The extent to which these measures can jointly predict listening-related factors is unknown.

Copresence Was Found to Be Related to Some Pupil Measures in Persons With Hearing Loss While They Performed a Speech-in-Noise Task.

Objectives: To assess if a manipulation of copresence was related to speech-in-noise task performance, arousal, and effort of persons with hearing loss. Task-related arousal and effort were measured by means of pupillometry.

Design: Twenty-nine participants (mean age: 64.

Social observation increases the cardiovascular response of hearing-impaired listeners during a speech reception task.

Certain cardiovascular measures allow for distinction between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity. Applied during listening, these measures may provide a novel and complementary insight into listening effort. To date, few studies have implemented cardiovascular measures of listening effort and seldom have these included hearing-impaired participants.

Investigating the Influences of Task Demand and Reward on Cardiac Pre-Ejection Period Reactivity During a Speech-in-Noise Task.

Objectives: Effort investment during listening varies as a function of task demand and motivation. Several studies have manipulated both these factors to elicit and measure changes in effort associated with listening. The cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) is a relatively novel measure in the field of cognitive hearing science.