5SThe Fifth Eriksholm Workshop on "Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy" was convened to develop a consensus among interdisciplinary experts about what is known on the topic, gaps in knowledge, the use of terminology, priorities for future research, and implications for practice. The general term cognitive energy was chosen to facilitate the broadest possible discussion of the topic. It goes back to Titchener (1908) who described the effects of attention on perception; he used the term psychic energy for the notion that limited mental resources can be flexibly allocated among perceptual and mental activities. The workshop focused on three main areas: (1) theories, models, concepts, definitions, and frameworks; (2) methods and measures; and (3) knowledge translation. We defined effort as the deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles in goal pursuit when carrying out a task, with listening effort applying more specifically when tasks involve listening. We adapted Kahneman's seminal (1973) Capacity Model of Attention to listening and proposed a heuristically useful Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL). Our FUEL incorporates the well-known relationship between cognitive demand and the supply of cognitive capacity that is the foundation of cognitive theories of attention. Our FUEL also incorporates a motivation dimension based on complementary theories of motivational intensity, adaptive gain control, and optimal performance, fatigue, and pleasure. Using a three-dimensional illustration, we highlight how listening effort depends not only on hearing difficulties and task demands but also on the listener's motivation to expend mental effort in the challenging situations of everyday life.
A group of older adults with good hearing and a group with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for recall of the final three words heard in a running memory task. Near perfect recall of the final words of the three-word sets by both good- and poor-hearing participants allowed the inference that all three words had been correctly identified. Nevertheless, the poor-hearing group recalled significantly fewer of the nonfinal words than did the better hearing group. This was true even though both groups were matched for age, education, and verbal ability. Results were taken as support for an effortfulness hypothesis: the notion that the extra effort that a hearing-impaired listener must expend to achieve perceptual success comes at the cost of processing resources that might otherwise be available for encoding the speech content in memory.
Recent evidence indicates that sensory and motor changes may precede the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) by several years and may signify increased risk of developing AD. Traditionally, sensory and motor dysfunctions in aging and AD have been studied separately. To ascertain the evidence supporting the relationship between age-related changes in sensory and motor systems and the development of AD and to facilitate communication between several disciplines, the National Institute on Aging held an exploratory workshop titled “Sensory and Motor Dysfunctions in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease”. The scientific sessions of the workshop focused on age-related and neuropathological changes in the olfactory, visual, auditory, and motor systems, followed by extensive discussion and hypothesis generation related to the possible links among sensory, cognitive, and motor domains in aging and AD. Based on the data presented and discussed at this workshop, it is clear that sensory and motor regions of the CNS are affected by Alzheimer pathology and that interventions targeting amelioration of sensory-motor deficits in AD may enhance patient function as AD progresses.
After some preliminary analysis of what is involved in naming objects, in which the possible role of classificatory systems in the memory store is discussed, it is shown experimentally that there are consistent differences between the times taken to respond to presented objects by uttering their names, variations between the performances of different individuals being outweighed by variations due to the; different objects. Moreovcr, there is a high consistency between different individuals as to the ordering of objects in respect of their naming latencies. It is further shown that a high correlation exists between the time taken to name an object and the frequency with which its name occurs in the language as a whole, as estimated in the Thorndike-Lorge Word List. Some implications of these findings are discussed, especially with reference to possible mechanisms by which presented objects are visually identified, and the appropriate names retrieved from the "word-store.'' INTRODUCTIONWhen we try to consider in any detail how appropriate words are chosen and produced in written or spoken discourse we are bound to contemplate, first the existence of some kind of store from which items are drawn, and secondly, some process by which the appropriate one is selected. In ordinary speech or writing a number of factors such as the existence of contextual, grammatical and syntactical constraints assist this choice. The ways in which these factors operate have been clarified by Shannon (1948), Taylor, W. L. (I953), Taylor, A. and Moray N. (1960) and other workers. It is now accepted, for instance, that much we say or write is determined by the statistical structure common to any discourse which is in practice meaningful, rather than by the particular proposition we seek to convey. To the extent that language is thus redundant, the act of choosing each individual item requires the processing of less information than it would in a symbolic system containing no interdependencies.There is, however, one special case of word-production in which little recourse to context is possible and where the task is far more specific than it is in continuous discourse. If an individual is presented with an ordinary object and asked to give its name, he is faced with a situation in which there is no verbal context to provide partial determination of his choice. There are, of course, a number of objects which have more than one reasonably appropriate name and also a number which share their name with others. But in general a person asked to name an object faces a specific question to which there is only one correct answer. Presented with a chair, the responses "table" and "monkey" are equally inappropriate.A rough sample count of the Concise Oxford Dictionary for words which could be correct answers to the question "What is this"? when some object is displayed gives a figure of about 5,000 items. To produce the correct answer to such a question an
A dual-task interference paradigm was used to investigate the effect of perceptual effort on recall of spoken word-lists by younger and older adults with good hearing and with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. In addition to poorer recall accuracy, listeners with hearing loss, especially older adults, showed larger secondary task costs while recalling the word-lists even though the stimuli were presented at a sound intensity that allowed correct word identification. Findings support the hypothesis that extra effort at the sensory-perceptual level attendant to hearing loss has negative consequences to downstream recall, an effect that may be further magnified with increased age.Keywords hearing loss; aging; speech processing; dual-task; memory Age-related hearing loss is the third most prevalent chronic medical condition among older adults (Lethbridge-Ceijku, Schiller, & Bernadel, 2004). When accompanied by age-related declines in attentional resources (Craik & Byrd, 1982), working memory capacity (Kausler, 1994), and processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), one can see the challenge facing many older adults as they attempt to comprehend and remember fast-paced speech in their everyday lives. In addition to missed or incorrectly identified words, diminished hearing may also lead to impoverished, less discriminable memory traces (Surprenant, 2007). There is, however, an additional concern. As argued initially by Rabbitt (1968Rabbitt ( , 1991, and subsequently supported by others, successful perception in the face of degraded input may come at the cost of attentional resources that might otherwise be available for encoding what has been heard in memory (e.g., McCoy, Tun, Cox, Colangelo, Stewart & Wingfield, 2005;Murphy, Craik, Li & Schneider, 2000;Pichora-Fuller, 2003;van Boxtel et al., 2000; Suprenant, 1999 Suprenant, , 2007.This potential contributor to poorer memory performance associated with hearing loss, a socalled "effortfulness hypothesis", has until now been inferred from performance on the memory task itself. This hypothesis would thus be strengthened by an independent measure of resource allocation attendant to successful recognition by individuals with good versus poor hearing. One solution is to use a dual-task paradigm in which participants are asked to listen to and recall speech materials as a primary task while also conducting a concurrent secondary task.Address Correspondence to: Dr. Patricia A. Tun, Volen National Center for Complex Systems (MS 013), Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, Tel: 781-736-3273, Fax: 781-736-3275, tun@brandeis.edu or wingfield@brandeis.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: The following manuscript is the final accepted manuscript. It has not been subjected to the final copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading required for formal publication. It is not the definitive, publisher-authenticated version. The American Psychological Association and its Council of Editors disclaim any responsibility or liabilities for errors or omissions of this manuscript version, any ver...
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