Pupillometry as a measure for listening effort in children

Abstract

Purpose Listening effort can be defined as the deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles when carrying out a listening task. Requiring mental resources, it may detract from other types of cognitive activities, leading to a general worsening of cognitive performances. The aim of this review is to provide information about how to use pupillometry to explore listening effort in children too and discuss the suitability of this technique when measuring listening effort in this population. Materials and methods After reporting a brief overview of pupillometry and listening effort, results from researchers concerning listening effort and children will be presented first to then go deeper into the research on the topic by means of pupillometry. Results Listening effort has a direct link with cognitive resources, as when the environment is surrounded by noise, the cognitive system requires additional effort and consequently the cognitive abilities required for the task that is being conducted becomes impoverished. This effect becomes more evident in the case of children, and has important consequences on speech perception and scholastic performance. Conclusions In children, listening effort is a major issue, as they are still developing mature language skills that can help them compensating for inaccurate speech recognition. Since children spend most of their time in noisy environments, it is very important to examine the consequences of listening in acoustically inadequate conditions. Pupillometry could be a good way of reflecting the effects of noise on children’s cognitive abilities by adding more objective evidence to the topic.

EEG power spectral dynamics associated with listening in adverse conditions

“…Using pupil size as an objective measure of listening effort, researchers have uncovered excess effort in individuals with hearing disorders, even when comprehension accuracy is high (e.g., Wagner et al., 2019; Winn & Moore, 2018; Zekveld et al., 2011). Pupillometry has also helped to identify potential solutions to excessive listening effort problems (e.g., through signal processing in hearing aids; Ohlenforst et al., 2017; Wendt et al., 2017) and has given researchers the capability to objectively measure listening effort in children who could experience developmental delays as a result of excessive effort (Gómez‐Merino et al., 2020). Recently, there have been a large number of studies that have used analyses of alpha‐band (~8–13 Hz) power in the M/EEG in a similar vein (Alhanbali et al., 2019; Decruy et al., 2020; Hall et al., 2019; Hunter, 2020; Marsella et al., 2017; McMahon et al., 2016; Miles et al., 2017; Obleser et al., 2012; Petersen et al., 2015; Seifi Ala et al., 2020; Winneke et al., 2020; Wöstmann et al., 2015).…”

How Reliable are 11- to 13-Year-Olds’ Self-Ratings of Effort in Noisy Conditions?

“…Previous studies found evidence of school-age children having to put more effort into listening tasks in background noise than in quiet, or when the level of background noise increased. This greater effort was revealed by slower response times (Lewis et al, 2016;McGarrigle et al, 2019;Prodi et al, 2019a;Prodi et al, 2019b;Picou et al, 2019), and by a larger task-evoked increase in pupil size (Steel et al, 2015;McGarrigle et al, 2017;Gómez-Merino et al, 2020). The results were not entirely consistent across the studies, however, presumably due to a different sensitivity of the listening effort measures (McGarrigle et al, 2017;McGarrigle et al, 2019), and to the children's difficulty in preferentially allocating their attention during dual tasks (Choi et al, 2008;Picou et al, 2019).…”

The Involvement of Listening Effort in Explaining Bilingual Listening Under Adverse Listening Conditions

“…One of the common physiological measures used to index listening effort is pupillometry. This measure examines task-evoked pupillary responses, where increased mean pupil dilation (average magnitude of pupil size observed during the task) and larger peak pupil size (maximum dilation recorded during the task), are associated with higher processing load, indicating increased effort (e.g., Gómez-Merino et al, 2020;Koelewijn et al, 2012Koelewijn et al, , 2014Kramer et al, 2016;Paulus et al, 2020;Silcox & Payne, 2021;van der Wel & van Steenbergen, 2018;Van Engen & McLaughlin, 2018;Wendt et al, 2014;Winn et al, 2015Winn et al, , 2018Zekveld et al, 2018;. In addition to pupillometry, various other physiological techniques have been suggested to capture differences in effort.…”