Mood shapes the impact of reward on perceived fatigue from listening.

Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of effortful listening could help to reduce cases of social withdrawal and mitigate fatigue, especially in older adults. However, the relationship between transient effort and longer term fatigue is likely to be more complex than originally thought. Here, we manipulated the presence/absence of monetary reward to examine the role of motivation and mood state in governing changes in perceived effort and fatigue from listening.

Signals of global symmetry are important for abnormality detection in mammograms.

Purpose: Expert radiologists can detect the "gist of abnormal" in bilateral mammograms even three years prior to onset of cancer. However, their performance decreases if both breasts are not from the same woman, suggesting the ability to detect the abnormality is partly dependent on a global signal present across the two breasts. We aim to detect this implicitly perceived "symmetry" signal by examining its effect on a pre-trained mammography model.

Older adults show a more sustained pattern of effortful listening than young adults.

Listening to speech in adverse conditions can be challenging and effortful, especially for older adults. This study examined age-related differences in effortful listening by recording changes in the task-evoked pupil response (TEPR; a physiological marker of listening effort) both at the level of sentence processing and over the entire course of a listening task. A total of 65 (32 young adults, 33 older adults) participants performed a speech recognition task in the presence of a competing talker, while moment-to-moment changes in pupil size were continuously monitored.

Effortful listening under the microscope: Examining relations between pupillometric and subjective markers of effort and tiredness from listening.

Effort during listening is commonly measured using the task-evoked pupil response (TEPR); a pupillometric marker of physiological arousal. However, studies to date report no association between TEPR and perceived effort. One possible reason for this is the way in which self-report effort measures are typically administered, namely as a single data point collected at the end of a testing session.

Phonetic categorization and discrimination of voice onset time under divided attention.

Event durations are perceived to be shorter under divided attention. "Time shrinkage" is thought to be due to rapid attentional switches between tasks, leading to a loss of input samples, and hence, an under-estimation of duration. However, few studies have considered whether this phenomenon applies to durations relevant to time-based phonetic categorization.

Cognitive load elevates discrimination thresholds of duration, intensity, and f for a synthesized vowel.

Dual-tasking negatively impacts on speech perception by raising cognitive load (CL). Previous research has shown that CL increases reliance on lexical knowledge and decreases reliance on phonetic detail. Less is known about the effect of CL on the perception of acoustic dimensions below the phonetic level.