Location
D.P. Culp Center Ballroom
Start Date
4-5-2024 9:00 AM
End Date
4-5-2024 11:30 AM
Poster Number
28
Name of Project's Faculty Sponsor
Marcy Hite
Faculty Sponsor's Department
Audiology and Speech Language Pathology
Competition Type
Competitive
Type
Poster Presentation
Presentation Category
Health
Abstract or Artist's Statement
Listening effort (LE) is a critical element of communication and quality of life. An objective way to measure LE is through pupil dilation, or pupillometry, via an eye tracker. As cognitive demands increase, the nervous system responds by increasing pupil dilation. In the case of a listening task, pupil dilation changes can be used to infer LE (Zekveld, Kramer, & Festen, 2010). While many studies test this methodology in adults, few studies have been done in children. This may be due to the increased activity/movement of children, as accurate pupil dilation measures are dependent on limited subject movement. Another eye tracking measure used to quantify cognitive effort is gaze duration (Pavlovic & Jensen, 2006; Meghanathan, van Leeuwen, & Nikolaev, 2015). Gaze duration relies less on limited subject movement and may provide a more efficient method for measuring LE in children. Another study consideration is the participant's subjective perception of LE. Some studies report correlations between objective and subjective measures of LE, although other investigations failed to find a relation (Picou et al., 2011). It is hypothesized that gaze duration will be more effective than pupil dilation for measuring LE in the pediatric population, and that subjective effort will positively correlate with duration of fixation as well as negatively correlate with accuracy (i.e., harder conditions will increase gaze duration and subjective ratings of effort but decrease accuracy). This study had adults aged 18+ with normal hearing and vision listen and repeat back sentences in competing noise while maintaining visual contact with a computer screen. The sentences were played at three different levels of listening difficulty (noise levels set at+15 SNR [Signal to Noise Ratio], +9 SNR, +3 SNR). After each sentence list, the participant was asked to subjectively rate their mental effort and fatigue. The SR Research Eyelink 1000+ eye tracker was connected to the computer and recorded pupil dilation and gaze duration of the participant during the listening task. Data analysis is ongoing and will be completed at the end of March.
Pediatric Listening Effort Pilot: Gaze vs Dilation
D.P. Culp Center Ballroom
Listening effort (LE) is a critical element of communication and quality of life. An objective way to measure LE is through pupil dilation, or pupillometry, via an eye tracker. As cognitive demands increase, the nervous system responds by increasing pupil dilation. In the case of a listening task, pupil dilation changes can be used to infer LE (Zekveld, Kramer, & Festen, 2010). While many studies test this methodology in adults, few studies have been done in children. This may be due to the increased activity/movement of children, as accurate pupil dilation measures are dependent on limited subject movement. Another eye tracking measure used to quantify cognitive effort is gaze duration (Pavlovic & Jensen, 2006; Meghanathan, van Leeuwen, & Nikolaev, 2015). Gaze duration relies less on limited subject movement and may provide a more efficient method for measuring LE in children. Another study consideration is the participant's subjective perception of LE. Some studies report correlations between objective and subjective measures of LE, although other investigations failed to find a relation (Picou et al., 2011). It is hypothesized that gaze duration will be more effective than pupil dilation for measuring LE in the pediatric population, and that subjective effort will positively correlate with duration of fixation as well as negatively correlate with accuracy (i.e., harder conditions will increase gaze duration and subjective ratings of effort but decrease accuracy). This study had adults aged 18+ with normal hearing and vision listen and repeat back sentences in competing noise while maintaining visual contact with a computer screen. The sentences were played at three different levels of listening difficulty (noise levels set at+15 SNR [Signal to Noise Ratio], +9 SNR, +3 SNR). After each sentence list, the participant was asked to subjectively rate their mental effort and fatigue. The SR Research Eyelink 1000+ eye tracker was connected to the computer and recorded pupil dilation and gaze duration of the participant during the listening task. Data analysis is ongoing and will be completed at the end of March.