Frontal midline θ power as an index of listening effort

Abstract

Attempts to identify physiological correlates of listening effort have mainly focused on peripheral measures (e.g. pupillometry) and auditory-evoked/event-related potentials. Although nonauditory studies have suggested that sustained time-frequency electroencephalographic (EEG) features in the θ-band (4-7 Hz) are correlated with domain-general mental effort, little work has characterized such features during effortful listening. Here, high-density EEG data was collected while listeners performed a sentence-recognition task in noise, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of which varied across blocks. Frontal midline θ (Fmθ), largely driven by sources localized in or near the medial frontal cortex, showed greater power with decreasing SNR and was positively correlated with self-reports of effort. Increased Fmθ was present before speech onset and during speech presentation. Fmθ power also differed across SNRs when including only trials in which all words were recognized, suggesting that the effects were unrelated to performance differences. Results suggest that frontal cortical networks play a larger role in listening as acoustic signals are increasingly masked. Further, sustained time-frequency EEG features may usefully supplement previously used peripheral and event-related potential measures in psychophysiological investigations of effortful listening.

Neurophysiological Measures of the Perception of Antismoking Public Service Announcements Among Young Population

“…Thus, the obtained GFP values have been standardized according to the baseline EEG activity acquired at the beginning and at the end of the experiment, similarly to the procedure applied for the frontal alpha asymmetry index. An increase in the frontal theta (i.e., mental effort) would imply an increase in the task difficulty (Wisniewski et al, 2015). …”

“…Finally, the sample size employed in the study has been set on the basis of the best practice adopted in numerous previous studies in literature, concerning the study of the electroencephalographic and autonomic indices employed in the research. In particular, in scientific literature for frontal alpha asymmetry, frontal theta as well as EI has been demonstrated as a sample size of 12–15 persons could be enough to capture less than 10% variation of these indexes (e.g., Gevins et al, 1997; Dussault et al, 2005; Domino et al, 2009; Maglione et al, 2014; Wascher et al, 2014; Cartocci et al, 2015, 2017; Wisniewski et al, 2015, 2017; Soria Morillo et al, 2016; Di Flumeri et al, 2016b; Cherubino et al, 2016a; Liu et al, 2017; Aghajani et al, 2017; Mennella et al, 2017). …”

“…The frontal theta as index of effort and processing has been already applied to a series of studies in different field of research. For instance, in the neuroaesthetics in response to auditory literature stimuli (Cartocci et al, 2016d); in avionic and car driving for the detection of the effort employed in the execution of flight simulation and driving tasks (Borghini et al, 2013, 2014, 2017; Aricò et al, 2014; Di Flumeri et al, 2015; Sciaraffa et al, 2017); in different challenging listening conditions both in normal hearing than in hearing impaired participants (Cartocci et al, 2015; Wisniewski et al, 2015, 2017) and to human–computer interaction (Gevins and Smith, 2003) studies.…”

The “NeuroDante Project”: Neurometric Measurements of Participant’s Reaction to Literary Auditory Stimuli from Dante’s “Divina Commedia”

“…Then the cerebral effort index (CE) data have been standardized according to the baseline EEG activity acquired at the beginning and at the end of the experiment. Higher level of CE imply higher level of task difficulty [13,26].…”

“…The neurometric indexes here employed were the Approach-Withdrawal (AW) [12], the Effort (CE) [13] and the Emotional indexes (EI) [14]. It is worth noticing that different research teams previously validated those indexes in literature.…”