In a Concurrent Memory and Auditory Perception Task, the Pupil Dilation Response Is More Sensitive to Memory Load Than to Auditory Stimulus Characteristics.
Adriana A Zekveld, Sophia E Kramer, Jerker Rönnberg and 1 others
PMID 29923867WHAT IT FOUND
When people memorize words while listening, pupil dilation stops tracking how hard the speech is to hear.
It tracks memory load instead. Semantic cues help hearing but confuse recall, as people mix up the cue words with the sentence they just heard.
Key findings
01The well-established effect of signal-to-noise ratio on pupil dilation during listening disappeared when participants simultaneously held cue words in memory, despite large differences in speech intelligibility.
02Semantically related cue words improved sentence repetition accuracy but worsened the subsequent recall of those cues, because participants made more intrusion errors by confusing cue words with sentence words.
03Pupil dilation during recall was larger when participants had to repeat the sentence before recalling cues, reflecting the cognitive cost of articulatory suppression on working memory.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only normal-hearing young adults, so the findings may not apply to older adults or those with hearing loss, who often have different cognitive resource allocations. The concurrent memory task was imposed externally, which may not fully replicate the naturalistic cognitive load of everyday listening where memory demands are less explicit. Pupil dilation was measured in a laboratory setting with specific room illumination adjustments, which may limit ecological validity. The study did not record the accuracy of the first response (whether participants said the cue words or sentence correctly before the recall phase), so it is unclear how often the first response failed.
Declared interests
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that semantic context always aids overall communication efficiency. While it helped participants understand the sentence better in this study, it actively harmed their ability to remember the context words themselves, leading to more errors and higher cognitive load during recall.