Revealing Perceptional and Cognitive Mechanisms in Static and Dynamic Cocktail Party Listening by Means of Error Analyses.

The study used simultaneous sentences from three loudspeakers in a sound-treated booth, so it may not capture everyday conversations with movement, room noise, or different languages. The sample included only mild-to-moderate symmetrical hearing loss and no hearing aid users, so the results do not show what happens with different hearing thresholds or with hearing aids. All participants passed a dementia screening test, so the findings do not address people with diagnosed cognitive impairment. Confusion errors were very small in the static condition and may have been affected by floor effects. The dynamic analysis used only switch trials and the trials before switches, and the model did not show a significant interaction between trial type and group. The group difference on non-switch trials came from a follow-up comparison. The lack of a previous-target bias may be due to short target periods of 2 to 5 trials, so it does not prove that attention disengagement is unaffected in longer conversations.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. They disclosed receipt of financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication, and the article is listed as supported by non-U.S. government research.

Do not conclude that older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss have a specific problem switching attention. The largest group difference was on trials before a switch, when the target was unpredictable, and there were no significant group differences on switch trials.