Increasing motivation changes subjective reports of listening effort and choice of coping strategy

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this project was to examine the effect of changing motivation on subjective ratings of listening effort and on the likelihood that a listener chooses either a controlling or an avoidance coping strategy. Design: Two experiments were conducted, one with auditory-only (AO) and one with auditory-visual (AV) stimuli, both using the same speech recognition in noise materials. Four signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were used, two in each experiment. The two SNRs targeted 80% and 50% correct performance. Motivation was manipulated by either having participants listen carefully to the speech (low motivation), or listen carefully to the speech and then answer quiz questions about the speech (high motivation). Study sample: Sixteen participants with normal hearing participated in each experiment. Eight randomly selected participants participated in both. Results: Using AO and AV stimuli, motivation generally increased subjective ratings of listening effort and tiredness. In addition, using auditory-visual stimuli, motivation generally increased listeners’ willingness to do something to improve the situation, and decreased their willingness to avoid the situation. Conclusions: These results suggest a listener's mental state may influence listening effort and choice of coping strategy.

Key Words::

• Listening effort
• coping strategy
• background noise
• visual cues

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Phonak AG and the Dan Maddox Hearing Aid Research Foundation, who provided financial support for participant compensation. In addition, the authors wish to express their sincerest thanks to Elizabeth Harland for her efforts recruiting participants and collecting data. In addition, the authors would like to thank Ulrike Lemke and Andrea Kegel for their insights during the planning and implementation stages of these projects.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.