What You Don’t Notice Can Harm You: Age-Related Differences in Detecting Concurrent Visual, Auditory, and Tactile Cues

Pitts, Brandon J.; Sarter, Nadine

doi:10.1177/0018720818759102

Cited by 31 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(57 reference statements)

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“…Furthermore, we expected higher multitask costs in the quadruple condition compared to the dual condition, in line with research showing a detrimental effect on multitask costs of having to process more than two tasks (e.g. Doumas and Krampe 2013;Bock et al 2018;Pitts and Sarter 2018;Devesse et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

The Cost of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cognitive Demands on Auditory Functioning in Older Adults With Normal Hearing or Using Hearing Aids

2020

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Objectives: We investigated the impact of both intrinsic and extrinsic cognitive demands on auditory and secondary task performance in older adults with normal hearing (NH) and adults using hearing aids (HAs) in an ecologically relevant listening environment.Design: Fifteen adults with NH and 15 adults using HAs(60 to 72 years of age) were recruited to perform the 'Audio-Visual True-to-Life Assessment of Auditory Rehabilitation'-paradigm (AVATAR), which combines an auditory-visual speech-in-noise task with three secondary tasks on either auditory localization or visual short-term memory in a preload multitask paradigm. Intrinsic demands were altered by presenting speech either at equivalent speech accuracy levels of 50% correct (SPIN50%) or equivalent speech-to-noise ratios of +5dB SNR (SPIN+5dB). We manipulated the amount of extrinsic cognitive demands by including one (dual-condition) or three secondary tasks (quadruple-condition). Performance decrements on the secondary tasks were considered to reflect an increase in resource allocation to speech understanding and thus increased listening effort. In addition, we administered a cognitive test battery as well as a questionnaire on self-reported hearing difficulties and subjective measures of effort and motivation.Results: Speech understanding and secondary task performance on the visual short-term memory task were lower in the SPIN50%-condition compared to SPIN+5dB. Whereas speech understanding at SPIN50% was equally high in the dual-and quadruple-conditions, the quadruple-condition resulted in lower secondary task performance on the visual short-term memory task, higher levels of self-reported effort and lower motivation compared to the dualtask condition. The same was true for experimental conditions at SPIN+5dB. Additionally, adults with NH outperformed adults using HAs on speech understanding, auditory localization and self-reported hearing abilities, but no group differences were observed on secondary task costs or cognitive measures.2 Conclusions: This study showed that, irrespective of the hearing status of the listener, speech performance was not affected by the amount of extrinsic cognitive demands, but was worse and required more effort in conditions with a more negative SNR. Also, increasing the extrinsic cognitive demands resulted in lower performance on one of the secondary tasks, suggesting that more complex listening environments require more effort. Although adults with NH outperformed HA users on speech understanding and auditory localization, the two groups did not differ with respect to secondary task costs.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 86%

The Cost of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cognitive Demands on Auditory Functioning in Older Adults With Normal Hearing or Using Hearing Aids

2020

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“…However, multitasking in real-life often involves the processing of more than two tasks and it has been shown before that the processing of more than two simultaneous cues may negatively influence performance on an alternate task. For example, Pitts and Sarter (2018) showed that performance on a driving task was impaired for both young and old participants when they simultaneously had to detect more than two nonredundant cues in different sensory modalities. Also, Doumas & Krampe (2013) found higher dual-task costs in a triple-task condition compared to a dual-task, when combining a working memory task together with a finger force and/or postural control task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

AVATAR Assesses Speech Understanding and Multitask Costs in Ecologically Relevant Listening Situations

2019

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Objectives -There is a high need amongst clinicians and researchers for an ecologically valid measure of auditory functioning and listening effort. Therefore, we developed AVATAR: an 'Audio-Visual True-to-life Assessment of Auditory Rehabilitation' which takes important characteristics of real-life listening situations into account, such as multimodal speech presentation, spatial separation of sound sources and multitasking. As such, AVATAR aims to assess both auditory functioning and the amount of allocated processing resources during listening in a realistic yet controllable way. In the present study, we evaluated AVATAR and investigated whether speech understanding in noise and multitask costs during realistic listening environments changed with increasing task complexity.Design -Thirty-five young normal hearing participants performed different task combinations of an auditory-visual speech-in-noise task and three secondary tasks on both auditory localization and visual short-term memory in a simulated restaurant environment. Tasks were combined in increasing complexity and multitask costs on the secondary tasks were investigated as an estimate of the amount of cognitive resources allocated during listening and multitasking.In addition to behavioral measures of auditory functioning and effort, working memory capacity and self-reported hearing difficulties were established using a reading span test and a questionnaire on daily hearing abilities.Results -Whereas performance on the speech-in-noise task was not affected by task complexity, multitask costs on one of the secondary tasks became significantly larger with increasing task complexity. Working memory capacity correlated significantly with multitask costs, but no association was observed between behavioral outcome measures and self-reported hearing abilities or effort. Devesse et al. AVATAR 3Conclusions -AVATAR proved to be a promising model to assess speech intelligibility and auditory localization abilities and to gauge the amount of processing resources during effortful listening in ecologically relevant multitasking situations by means of multitask costs. In contrast to current clinical measures of auditory functioning, results showed that listening and multitasking in challenging listening environments can require a considerable amount of processing resources, even for young normal hearing adults. Furthermore, the allocation of resources increased in more demanding listening situations. These findings open avenues for a more realistic assessment of auditory functioning and individually tuned auditory rehabilitation for individuals of different age and hearing profiles.

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“…For example, in manual driving, Lundqvist and Eriksson (2019) and Politis, Brewster, and Pollick (2014), evaluated all uni-, bi-, and trimodal combinations of visual (V), auditory (A), and tactile (T) cues (i.e., V, A, T, VA, VT, AT, and VAT) and showed multisensory performance gains, in terms of response times to signals. Pitts and Sarter (2018) confirmed these benefits, even though they explained that their 7 stimuli were partially redundant. Still, to date, very few studies have investigated the extent to which these findings generalize to the context of autonomous driving, where the attention allocation of a driver disengaged from the driving task may be very different from that of a manual driver.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Tactile signals were created using two C-2 tactors, which are 1" × 0.5" × 0.25" piezo-buzzers (developed by Engineering Acoustics, Inc.) with frequency of 250 Hz. The two tactors were attached to a belt and positioned across the lower back (as inPitts & Sarter, 2018). When activated, both tactors vibrated at the same time.Driving Environment: Road Signs.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal Cue Combinations: A Possible Approach to Designing In-Vehicle Takeover Requests for Semi-autonomous Driving

Huang

Steele

Xinrui

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual

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The rapid growth of autonomous vehicles is expected to improve roadway safety. However, certain levels of vehicle automation will still require drivers to ‘takeover’ during abnormal situations, which may lead to breakdowns in driver-vehicle interactions. To date, there is no agreement on how to best support drivers in accomplishing a takeover task. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of multimodal alerts as a feasible approach. In particular, we examined the effects of uni-, bi-, and trimodal combinations of visual, auditory, and tactile cues on response times to takeover alerts. Sixteen participants were asked to detect 7 multimodal signals (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, visual-auditory, visual-tactile, auditory-tactile, and visual-auditory-tactile) while driving under two conditions: with SAE Level 3 automation only or with SAE Level 3 automation in addition to performing a road sign detection task. Performance on the signal and road sign detection tasks, pupil size, and perceived workload were measured. Findings indicate that trimodal combinations result in the shortest response time. Also, response times were longer and perceived workload was higher when participants were engaged in a secondary task. Findings may contribute to the development of theory regarding the design of takeover request alert systems within (semi) autonomous vehicles.

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What You Don’t Notice Can Harm You: Age-Related Differences in Detecting Concurrent Visual, Auditory, and Tactile Cues

Cited by 31 publications

References 50 publications

The Cost of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cognitive Demands on Auditory Functioning in Older Adults With Normal Hearing or Using Hearing Aids

The Cost of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cognitive Demands on Auditory Functioning in Older Adults With Normal Hearing or Using Hearing Aids

AVATAR Assesses Speech Understanding and Multitask Costs in Ecologically Relevant Listening Situations

Multimodal Cue Combinations: A Possible Approach to Designing In-Vehicle Takeover Requests for Semi-autonomous Driving

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