In this project, Xena Liu at University College London explores how ‘listening effort’ – the cognitive resources a person must use to follow conversations in noisy environments – can lead to mental fatigue and increase with age.
Project start date: October 2023
Project end date: September 2026
Read the project outcomes here.
About the project
Listening in crowded environments not only depends on how good your hearing is, but also on additional cognitive (brain) abilities, such as attention and memory. The use of these brain resources during listening is often called ‘listening effort’.
For people with hearing loss, listening effort is greater and often leads to mental fatigue. In some cases, it can cause people with hearing loss to withdraw from social situations. A major challenge is to develop technology with which listening effort can be assessed objectively.
Xena is testing the novel hypothesis that information gleaned from the eyes – through observing pupil dilation and also changes to eye movements and blinking behaviour – can provide insight into listening challenges.
How it works
Xena is testing a large group of participants to determine how eye movements are linked to various listening challenges exhibited by individuals.
They will test ways to estimate listening effort to see if this helps to explain problems with listening attention as people age. In the final year of the project,Xena will test people with various types of hearing loss who particularly struggle with listening in noisy settings.
How will this research benefit people with hearing loss?
The findings from this project should demonstrate useful measures of listening effort that may provide researchers and clinicians with ways to assess attention and problems with attention, both in the process of healthy ageing and in various clinical populations where failures of auditory attention are suspected.
What we’ve learned so far
Early findings show that cognitive processes during listening, including effort and attention, can be tracked using simple, non‑invasive eye‑based measures. Using a carefully designed listening task and eye‑tracking, the researchers have shown that different eye movement signatures may potentially be able to disentangle different processes in effortful listening, such as focusing on important sounds and blocking out distractions.
This could potentially provide guidance in clinical applications, for example in assessing whether difficulties in listening to speech in noisy backgrounds arises from attentional breakdowns.
Next, the researchers are further developing these measures to test in more naturalistic conditions (e.g. speech), as well as investigating the underlying neurological processes in effortful listening.
About the researcher
Xena Liu is a PhD student in Professor Maria Chait’s lab at University College London. Her RNID-funded PhD studentship began in 2023.
The intricate interplay between hearing and other senses such as vision, as well as cognitive functions such as attention and working memory, provides a valuable avenue to gain deeper insight into the brain and human communication, and there is also the potential for significant clinical benefit. ”
