Measuring and Understanding Listening Effort (0.2 CEUs)

Measuring and Understanding Listening Effort (0.2 CEUs)

Monday, September 18, 2017; 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. ET

Presenter(s): Matthew Winn, Erin Picou, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, and Mark Eckert

CEUs: 0.2

Duration: 2 hours

Instructional Level: Introductory/Intermediate

Program Focus: Knowledge

Learner Outcomes: Upon completion, each participant in the eAudiology Web seminar will be able to:

Recognize the financial, social and psychological impact of elevated listening effort for people with hearing loss.
Understand how listening effort can have consequences that don’t always show up in word recognition scores.
List different sources of listening effort.
Interpret different measures of listening effort and recognize their relative strengths and weaknesses.
Identify different ways that listening effort can be reduced.

Description: People with hearing loss exert more effort to understand speech. Increased listening effort is thought to impact quality of life in a number of ways, including increased fatigue and medical problems, poorer job performance, early retirement and unwillingness to socialize. Listening effort is not the same as accuracy for word recognition because words can be heard effortlessly or with great strain. Clinicians frequently notice when a patient is struggling but often have no way of quantifying effort or annotating it in an audiogram. In this discussion, we will focus on what is known about listening effort and the ways it can be measured in adults and children. Techniques for measuring effort can vary greatly, and include subjective measures (surveys), objective behavioral measures (reaction times and interference with multi-tasking) and physiological measures (cortical activity, heart rate, pupil dilation). Each of these techniques offers a glimpse into the mental work needed to hear and understand speech.

Matt Winn, AuD, PhD

Assistant Professor, University of Washington

Matthew Winn, AuD, PhD is an assistant professor at the University of Washington. His lab focuses on listening effort and speech perception in people with cochlear implants, as well as binaural hearing and basic auditory science.

Erin Picou, PhD

Research Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Erin Picou, PhD is a research assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Picou's research interests are primarily related to hearing aid technologies for adults and children, with a specific focus on speech recognition, listening effort and emotional responses to sound.

Susan Teubner-Rhodes, PhD

Assistant Professor, Medical University of South Carolina

Susan Teubner-Rhodes, PhD is an assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. Her research examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support language processing under conditions of uncertainty, when communication is most likely to break down.

Mark Eckert, PhD

Professor, Medical University of South Carolina

Mark Eckert, PhD is a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. His research focuses on understanding the neural basis of individual differences in language and cognitive abilities, with special focus on age-related difficulties in speech recognition related to changes within the central nervous system.