KU Leuven, Department of Neurosciences, ExpORL, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Ear Hear. 2020 May/Jun;41(3):521-531. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000778.
There is a high need among clinicians and researchers for an ecologically valid measure of auditory functioning and listening effort. Therefore, we developed AVATAR: an "Audiovisual True-to-life Assessment of Auditory Rehabilitation" which takes important characteristics of real-life listening situations into account, such as multimodal speech presentation, spatial separation of sound sources and multitasking. As such, AVATAR aims to assess both auditory functioning and the amount of allocated processing resources during listening in a realistic yet controllable way. In the present study, we evaluated AVATAR and investigated whether speech understanding in noise and multitask costs during realistic listening environments changed with increasing task complexity.
Thirty-five young normal-hearing participants performed different task combinations of an auditory-visual speech-in-noise task and three secondary tasks on both auditory localization and visual short-term memory in a simulated restaurant environment. Tasks were combined in increasing complexity and multitask costs on the secondary tasks were investigated as an estimate of the amount of cognitive resources allocated during listening and multitasking. In addition to behavioral measures of auditory functioning and effort, working memory capacity and self-reported hearing difficulties were established using a reading span test and a questionnaire on daily hearing abilities.
Whereas performance on the speech-in-noise task was not affected by task complexity, multitask costs on one of the secondary tasks became significantly larger with increasing task complexity. Working memory capacity correlated significantly with multitask costs, but no association was observed between behavioral outcome measures and self-reported hearing abilities or effort.
AVATAR proved to be a promising model to assess speech intelligibility and auditory localization abilities and to gauge the amount of processing resources during effortful listening in ecologically relevant multitasking situations by means of multitask costs. In contrast with current clinical measures of auditory functioning, results showed that listening and multitasking in challenging listening environments can require a considerable amount of processing resources, even for young normal-hearing adults. Furthermore, the allocation of resources increased in more demanding listening situations. These findings open avenues for a more realistic assessment of auditory functioning and individually tuned auditory rehabilitation for individuals of different age and hearing profiles.
临床医生和研究人员非常需要一种生态有效的听觉功能和听力努力测量方法。因此，我们开发了 AVATAR：一种“听觉康复的视听真实评估”，它考虑了真实听力情况下的重要特征，例如多模态语音呈现、声源的空间分离和多任务处理。因此，AVATAR 的目的是在现实但可控的情况下评估听觉功能和听力过程中分配的处理资源量。在本研究中，我们评估了 AVATAR，并研究了在真实听力环境中，噪声下的言语理解和多任务成本是否随任务复杂性的增加而变化。
35 名年轻的正常听力参与者在模拟餐厅环境中执行听觉-视觉语音噪声任务和三个次要任务的不同任务组合，包括听觉定位和视觉短期记忆。任务以递增的复杂性进行组合，并研究了次要任务的多任务成本，作为分配给听力和多任务处理的认知资源量的估计。除了听觉功能和努力的行为测量外，还使用阅读广度测试和日常听力能力问卷来确定工作记忆容量和自我报告的听力困难。
尽管噪声下的言语理解任务不受任务复杂性的影响，但随着任务复杂性的增加，其中一个次要任务的多任务成本显著增加。工作记忆容量与多任务成本显著相关，但行为结果测量与自我报告的听力能力或努力之间没有关联。
AVATAR 被证明是一种很有前途的模型，可以评估言语可懂度和听觉定位能力，并通过多任务成本来衡量在生态相关的多任务情况下努力听力时处理资源的数量。与当前的听觉功能临床测量方法不同，结果表明，即使是年轻的正常听力成年人，在具有挑战性的听力环境中进行听力和多任务处理也可能需要相当多的处理资源。此外，在要求较高的听力情况下，资源的分配会增加。这些发现为更真实地评估听觉功能和为不同年龄和听力状况的个体提供个性化的听觉康复开辟了道路。
