Investigating the Influences of Task Demand and Reward on Cardiac Pre-Ejection Period Reactivity During a Speech-in-Noise Task.
Bethany Plain, Michael Richter, Adriana A Zekveld and 3 others
PMID 33201048WHAT IT FOUND
Cardiac measures show effort rises linearly with listening difficulty in normal-hearing adults, but monetary reward fails to alter physiological effort.
Participants with higher daily fatigue invested more cardiac effort, contradicting the idea that fatigue reduces engagement.
Key findings
01Cardiac pre-ejection period reactivity increased linearly with task difficulty, with no evidence of participants disengaging even at the hardest signal-to-noise ratios.
02Offering high versus low monetary reward did not significantly change cardiac effort reactivity or self-rated effort, despite improving speech recognition performance.
03Higher self-reported daily fatigue was associated with greater overall cardiac effort investment, a finding opposite to previous pupillometry research.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample consisted only of 31 young adults with normal hearing, limiting generalization to patients with hearing loss or older adults. The reward manipulation failed to produce a physiological effect, possibly because the session length or reward magnitude was insufficient. The study lacked a retention phase, which may have missed aspects of listening effort that occur after the target sentence ends. Disengagement was not observed even at very difficult levels, potentially because the single-talker masker allowed for 'dip listening' or social pressure from the experimenter's presence.
Declared interests
The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of reward effect on cardiac effort as evidence that motivation does not influence listening. The reward did improve performance, and the failure to see a physiological change may reflect methodological limitations such as session length or the specific cardiac measure used, not a true absence of motivational impact.