1 Department of Psychology and Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA.
Trends Hear. 2018 Jan-Dec;22:2331216518790907. doi: 10.1177/2331216518790907.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between effort and performance. Early formulations implied that, as the challenge of a task increases, individuals will exert more effort, with resultant maintenance of stable performance. We report an experiment in which normal-hearing young adults, normal-hearing older adults, and older adults with age-related mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for comprehension of recorded sentences that varied the comprehension challenge in two ways. First, sentences were constructed that expressed their meaning either with a simpler subject-relative syntactic structure or a more computationally demanding object-relative structure. Second, for each sentence type, an adjectival phrase was inserted that created either a short or long gap in the sentence between the agent performing an action and the action being performed. The measurement of pupil dilation as an index of processing effort showed effort to increase with task difficulty until a difficulty tipping point was reached. Beyond this point, the measurement of pupil size revealed a commitment of effort by the two groups of older adults who failed to keep pace with task demands as evidenced by reduced comprehension accuracy. We take these pupillometry data as revealing a complex relationship between task difficulty, effort, and performance that might not otherwise appear from task performance alone.
近年来，人们对努力与绩效之间的关系越来越感兴趣。早期的表述暗示，随着任务难度的增加，个体将付出更多的努力，从而保持稳定的绩效。我们报告了一项实验，其中正常听力的年轻人、正常听力的老年人和与年龄相关的轻度至中度听力损失的老年人接受了记录句子的理解测试，这些句子在两个方面改变了理解难度。首先，句子的结构要么采用更简单的主语关系结构，要么采用更具计算挑战性的宾语关系结构来表达其含义。其次，对于每种句子类型，插入一个形容词短语，在执行动作的主体和正在执行的动作之间形成一个短或长的间隔。瞳孔扩张的测量作为处理努力的指标表明，努力随着任务难度的增加而增加，直到达到难度转折点。在这一点之后，瞳孔大小的测量显示出努力的承诺，两组老年人无法跟上任务需求，因为理解准确性降低。我们将这些瞳孔测量数据视为揭示任务难度、努力和绩效之间复杂关系的证据，而这些关系单凭任务绩效可能不会显现出来。
