Department of Molecular Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
BrainSigns ltd, Rome, Italy.
PLoS One. 2023 Aug 10;18(8):e0288461. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288461. eCollection 2023.
Despite the plethora of studies investigating listening effort and the amount of research concerning music perception by cochlear implant (CI) users, the investigation of the influence of background noise on music processing has never been performed. Given the typical speech in noise recognition task for the listening effort assessment, the aim of the present study was to investigate the listening effort during an emotional categorization task on musical pieces with different levels of background noise. The listening effort was investigated, in addition to participants' ratings and performances, using EEG features known to be involved in such phenomenon, that is alpha activity in parietal areas and in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), that includes the Broca's area. Results showed that CI users performed worse than normal hearing (NH) controls in the recognition of the emotional content of the stimuli. Furthermore, when considering the alpha activity corresponding to the listening to signal to noise ratio (SNR) 5 and SNR10 conditions subtracted of the activity while listening to the Quiet condition-ideally removing the emotional content of the music and isolating the difficulty level due to the SNRs- CI users reported higher levels of activity in the parietal alpha and in the homologous of the left IFG in the right hemisphere (F8 EEG channel), in comparison to NH. Finally, a novel suggestion of a particular sensitivity of F8 for SNR-related listening effort in music was provided.
尽管有大量研究探讨听力努力和人工耳蜗（CI）使用者对音乐感知的研究，但对背景噪声对音乐处理的影响的研究从未进行过。鉴于听力努力评估的典型语音噪声识别任务，本研究旨在调查在不同背景噪声水平的音乐作品的情感分类任务中听力努力的情况。除了参与者的评分和表现外，还使用已知涉及这种现象的 EEG 特征来研究听力努力，即顶叶区域和左侧额下回（IFG）的α活动，其中包括布罗卡区。结果表明，CI 用户在识别刺激的情感内容方面的表现逊于正常听力（NH）对照组。此外，当考虑到与 SNR5 和 SNR10 条件下的信号到噪声比（SNR）相对应的α活动减去在安静条件下的活动时，理想情况下消除音乐的情感内容并隔离由于 SNR 引起的难度水平-与 NH 相比，CI 用户报告在右侧顶叶的α活动和左侧 IFG 的同源性（F8 EEG 通道）中具有更高的活动水平。最后，提出了一个关于 F8 对音乐中与 SNR 相关的听力努力特别敏感的新建议。
