Noise increases listening effort in normal-hearing young adults, regardless of working memory capacity

ABSTRACT

As listening conditions worsen (e.g. background noise increases), additional cognitive effort is required to process speech. The existing literature is mixed on whether and how cognitive traits like working memory capacity moderate the amount of effort that listeners must expend to successfully understand speech. Here, we validate a dual-task measure of listening effort (Experiment 1) and demonstrate that for normal-hearing young adults, effort increases as steady-state masking noise increases, but working memory capacity is unrelated to the amount of effort expended (Experiment 2). We propose that previous research may have overestimated the relationship between listening effort and working memory capacity by measuring listening effort using recall-based tasks. The present results suggest caution in making the general assumption that working memory capacity is related to the amount of effort expended during a listening task.

KEYWORDS:

• Listening effort
• working memory
• speech
• dual-task
• individual differences

Acknowledgements

Carleton College supported this work. We are grateful to Naseem Dillman-Hasso, Kate Finsteun-Magro, Alexander Frieden, Maryam Hedayati, Sasha Mayn, Lucia Ray, Julia Smith, Janna Wennberg, and Annie Zanger for assistance with data collection and helpful conversations, and to the Engle lab for providing Reading Span materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Violet A. Brown http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5310-6499

Julia F. Strand http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5950-0139

Notes

1. An exploratory analysis that included the twenty-two eliminated participants was also conducted out of concern that removing those participants might mask any effects of cognitive overload. That analysis revealed the same conclusions as the analysis reported here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carleton College.