Abstract
A group of older adults with good hearing and a group with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for recall of the final three words heard in a running memory task. Near perfect recall of the final words of the three-word sets by both good- and poor-hearing participants allowed the inference that all three words had been correctly identified. Nevertheless, the poor-hearing group recalled significantly fewer of the nonfinal words than did the better hearing group. This was true even though both groups were matched for age, education, and verbal ability. Results were taken as support for an effortfulness hypothesis: the notion that the extra effort that a hearing-impaired listener must expend to achieve perceptual success comes at the cost of processing resources that might otherwise be available for encoding the speech content in memory.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by NIH Grant AG19714 from the National Institute on Aging. We also gratefully acknowledge support from the W.M. Keck Foundation. The authors would like to thank Patrick Rabbitt, John Towse, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Notes
We use the terms “resources” and “resource capacity” in Kahneman's (Citation1973) original sense, to refer to a limited pool of attentional resources that must be allocated among tasks. In Kahneman's formulation, processing resources for a particular task will be diminished if access to the same resources is required for performance of multiple tasks that must be performed concurrently or in close sequence: in this case, perceptual processing of the spoken words and their encoding in memory. The more difficult or resource demanding a particular task, the fewer resources will be available for use elsewhere in the system. As such, Kahneman's notion of resource capacity is used in the same sense as CitationBaddeley's (1996, Citation1998) notion of a limited-capacity central executive in working memory.