Subjective Listening Effort and Electrodermal Activity in Listening Situations with Reverberation and Noise.
Inga Holube, Kristina Haeder, Christina Imbery and 1 others
PMID 27698257WHAT IT FOUND
Both groups rated more effort in hard reverberation than hard noise.
Skin conductance did not reliably separate conditions, so EDA alone is not a ready measure of listening effort.
Key findings
01Subjective listening effort, stress, and speech recognition ratings differed significantly between easy and hard conditions, and hard reverberation required higher listening effort than hard noise.
02Skin conductance z-values did not significantly differ across conditions for either group, and peak-rate differences did not survive post-hoc testing for normal-hearing listeners or show significance for hearing-impaired listeners.
03EDA z-values correlated significantly with subjective ratings only for normal-hearing listeners in noise; hearing-impaired listeners showed a significant correlation only between EDA z-values and subjective speech recognition in reverberation.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 10 normal-hearing and 17 hearing-impaired subjects were analyzed, so the study is small and exploratory. Five participants were excluded because of body movements, briefly falling asleep, hot flushes, or feeling faint. The normal-hearing group was young and mostly inexperienced with listening tests, while the hearing-impaired group was older and experienced, so age, hearing loss, and test experience are mixed together. The lab used headphones in a sound-isolated booth and required repeated sentences, so it may not reflect everyday listening. High EDA amplitudes during interviews were mainly due to body movement, so the physiological signal was noisy. The authors state EDA is influenced by unknown factors and may not distinguish conditions without more stress.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that skin conductance is a validated objective measure of listening effort. The EDA differences across conditions were mostly nonsignificant, and correlations with subjective ratings were limited to normal-hearing listeners in noise.