Non-Auditory Participant Characteristics Influence Digit-Perception Performance: Evidence From Tasks Varying in Masker Type and Spatial Cues.

The study was exploratory and made many comparisons without formal correction for multiple testing, so the findings are hypothesis-generating. The sample was narrow: 220 teenagers with normal hearing were screened at baseline, and 191 completed the full study, so results may not apply to older people or people with hearing loss. Only one cognitive measure was used, forward digit span, which mainly tests short-term memory and may not capture other cognitive processes relevant to listening. Education and deprivation were coarse proxies: deprivation came from postcode area rather than personal income, and the youngest 11% of participants reported predicted GCSE grades, while the remaining 89% reported final grades. Musical experience was treated only as three or more years of regular practice versus less, ignoring instrument type, training intensity, and current engagement. The three tasks varied in masker and spatial cues at the same time, so the study cannot say which feature made a task vulnerable to non-auditory influences. The listening tasks had technical limits: the digits-in-noise task was given to one ear while the others were given to both ears, the task lengths were kept short, which may have reduced threshold precision, and spatial sounds used average spatial cues rather than cues fitted to each person's ears.

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council UK and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Do not read a poor score on the spatial digit task as proof of an auditory problem. In this study, that score was independently related to educational attainment, area-level deprivation, and musical experience in young people with normal hearing.