A Taxonomy of Fatigue Concepts and Their Relation to Hearing Loss

Abstract

Fatigue is common in individuals with a variety of chronic health conditions and can have significant negative effects on quality of life. Although limited in scope, recent work suggests persons with hearing loss may be at increased risk for fatigue, in part due to effortful listening that is exacerbated by their hearing impairment. However, the mechanisms responsible for hearing loss-related fatigue, and the efficacy of audiologic interventions for reducing fatigue, remain unclear. To improve our understanding of hearing loss-related fatigue, as a field it is important to develop a common conceptual understanding of this construct. In this paper the broader fatigue literature is reviewed to identify and describe core constructs, consequences and methods for assessing fatigue and related constructs. Finally, our current knowledge linking hearing loss and fatigue is described and may be summarised as follows: Hearing impairment increases the risk of subjective fatigue and vigor deficits.Adults with hearing loss require more time to recover from fatigue after work, and have more work absences.Sustained, effortful, listening can be fatiguing.Optimal methods for eliciting and measuring fatigue in persons with hearing loss remain unclear and may vary with listening condition.Amplification may minimize decrements in cognitive processing speed during sustained effortful listening. Future research is needed to develop reliable measurement methods to quantify hearing loss-related fatigue; explore factors responsible for modulating fatigue in people with hearing loss; and identify and evaluate potential interventions for reducing hearing loss-related fatigue.

Effects of Second Language Proficiency and Linguistic Uncertainty on Recognition of Speech in Native and Nonnative Competing Speech

“…Our goal of supplementing the behavioral SRT measure with a physiological measure was to permit the possibility of distinguishing between conditions exhibiting poor performance that results from listeners "giving up" on the task (cf. Eckert, Teubner-Rhodes, & Vaden, 2016;Hornsby, Naylor, & Bess, 2016;Strauss & Francis, 2017), which would result in a pattern of poor performance but low physiological evidence of effort and conditions that result in listeners simply not being able to perform as well despite trying harder (high effort with poor performance). Pupil dilation has long been used as a tool for investigating cognitive demand (Beatty, 1982;Kahneman, 1973) and has been shown to effectively index a variety of linguistic processing demands (Piquado, Isaacowitz, & Wingfield, 2010) and listening effort .…”

Listening and Learning: Cognitive Contributions to the Rehabilitation of Older Adults With and Without Audiometrically Defined Hearing Loss

“…Audiometrically defined hearing loss is associated with decreased speech understanding (CHABA 1988) and mental fatigue (Hornsby et al, this issue, pp. XXXX).…”

Neural mechanisms of mental fatigue elicited by sustained auditory processing

“…Mental fatigue has been shown to affect both physical and cognitive performance (Hopstaken et al, 2014; Marcora et al, 2009), and to arise from sustained, demanding activity – either physical or cognitive in nature (Cook et al, 2017; van der Linden et al, 2003; for review see: Hornsby et al, 2016). While definitions vary widely, the present study concerns itself primarily with mental fatigue as an adaptive process, as outlined in the motivation control theory of fatigue proposed by G. Robert Hockey (MCT; Hockey, 1997, 2013).…”