Abstract
Listening effort is a key component of any experimental task involving auditory processing. It is important to understand exactly how participants are allocating mental resources in order to accurately process the data being presented to them. This aspect of speech processing is especially salient when participants listen under challenging conditions, such as in simulations of cochlear implant (CI) use. CIs have grown increasingly popular among older adults with hearing loss that does not respond to conventional hearing aids. However, despite their success in improving quality of life and ability to participate in conversations for older adults, they still provide an overall degraded sound experience as compared to typical acoustic hearing. Despite this flaw, both young adults and older adults with CIs have been shown to perform as well as their typically hearing peers in experimental tasks and lay conversations. However, it has been shown that they exert far more effort in order to do so, leading to higher rates of auditory fatigue. Several models have been created to define, operationalize, and measure this paradigm to measure effort. Although objective means of effort measurement have been shown to be superior overall, several subjective effort measurement tools have also been shown to be useful in some contexts. A study will be proposed in which young adults and older adults listen to fairly complex expository passages that have been modified via vocoding to simulate the spectral channels of a CI. The participants will use two different subjective effort measurement tools: Likert-scale based questions and a broader self-report rating system to characterize their engagement with the task. These systems will be compared both to each other and to an objective effort measurement system (pupillometry) in order to determine which is most effective in elucidating accurate effort ratings for use in future experimentation.