Different Measures of Auditory and Visual Stroop Interference and Their Relationship to Speech Intelligibility in Noise

Abstract

Inhibition—the ability to suppress goal-irrelevant information—is thought to be an important cognitive skill in many situations, including speech-in-noise (SiN) perception. One way to measure inhibition is by means of Stroop tasks, in which one stimulus dimension must be named while a second, more prepotent dimension is ignored. The to-be-ignored dimension may be relevant or irrelevant to the target dimension, and the inhibition measure—Stroop interference (SI)—is calculated as the reaction time difference between the relevant and irrelevant conditions. Both SiN perception and inhibition are suggested to worsen with age, yet attempts to connect age-related declines in these two abilities have produced mixed results. We suggest that the inconsistencies between studies may be due to methodological issues surrounding the use of Stroop tasks. First, the relationship between SI and SiN perception may differ depending on the modality of the Stroop task; second, the traditional SI measure may not account for generalized slowing or sensory declines, and thus may not provide a pure interference measure. We investigated both claims in a group of 50 older adults, who performed two Stroop tasks (visual and auditory) and two SiN perception tasks. For each Stroop task, we calculated interference scores using both the traditional difference measure and methods designed to address its various problems, and compared the ability of these different scoring methods to predict SiN performance, alone and in combination with hearing sensitivity. Results from the two Stroop tasks were uncorrelated and had different relationships to SiN perception. Changing the scoring method altered the nature of the predictive relationship between Stroop scores and SiN perception, which was additionally influenced by hearing sensitivity. These findings raise questions about the extent to which different Stroop tasks and/or scoring methods measure the same aspect of cognition. They also highlight the importance of considering additional variables such as hearing ability when analyzing cognitive variables.

Can cochlear implantation improve neurocognition in the aging population?

“…Additionally, the ability to suppress irrelevant information is particularly important for individuals with hearing impairment, in order to filter out lexical information. 67 Inhibition, as assessed by the Flanker, significantly improved for incompatible stimuli. Raw data revealed that the number of correct answers, but not the reaction time, improved.…”

Listening Effort: How the Cognitive Consequences of Acoustic Challenge Are Reflected in Brain and Behavior

“…Although there may be differences in the framing of attentional processes in terms of inhibition or performance monitoring, these imaging results suggest that there may be a connection between constructs of performance monitoring and inhibition as measured by the Stroop task. Individual differences in Stroop-based inhibition scores have been found in at least some studies to relate to speech understanding accuracy, such that listeners with better inhibitory ability (smaller Stroop effects) perform better on speech understanding tasks than listeners with poorer inhibitory ability ( Dey & Sommers 2015 ; Sommers & Danielson 1999 ; Taler et al 2010 ), although this relationship depends on the specifics of the task ( Knight & Heinrich 2017 ).…”

Reproducibility in Cognitive Hearing Research: Theoretical Considerations and Their Practical Application in Multi-Lab Studies

“…For example, Morgan and Brandt (1989) report an auditory Stroop interference effect only in the pitch domain, but not in the time domain. Additionally, Knight and Heinrich (2017) found a modest auditory Stroop interference effect using a gender-based task only on the group level, but could not replicate this effect for every participant or indeed for every one of the four speakers used in their materials.…”

“…The visual Stroop task is an example of a task with a rich conceptual replication history, particularly as concerns the testing materials. For example, some studies enhance the visibility of the color by replacing font color with a larger patch of color underneath a superimposed word (Janse, 2012;Knight and Heinrich, 2017). For the control condition, some studies use a string of Xs as their irrelevant characters, while others use unrelated words or even simply blank patches of color (MacLeod, 1991).…”