What is it about?
Following a conversation in a noisy restaurant takes brain power, but that power is hard to measure. The classic method traces pupil size of the listener's eyes, however, it has extensive requirements on the testing environment. We asked whether eye movements might work as well. Across 3 experiments, we found that the harder the listening, the less their eyes moved: each gaze was held longer, and the eyes moved over a smaller, more restricted area.
Featured Image
Photo by Eric Mok on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Hearing loss affects roughly 40% of people over 60, but it is often diagnosed decades after conversation in noisy places has become exhausting. A practical measure of listening effort could help close that gap by extending clinic assessments to daily life settings. Eye movements have several psychometric advantages over pupil size. Beyond the application, our finding points to a link between the brain systems that control where we look and those that handle mental load.
Perspectives
We started from a goal to further improve measures of listening effort. People seem to "quiet" their eyes when they concentrate, and we wanted to know whether and how to measure this pattern in a lab. What surprised me was how cleanly eye movements tracked effort during a ten-minute story, this could compensate for the exact limitations of classic pupil size measure. These experiments tested younger adults with normal hearing; the next step is asking whether the same pattern holds in older listeners, where it would matter most.
M. Eric Cui
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Eye Movements Decrease during Effortful Speech Listening, Journal of Neuroscience, July 2023, Society for Neuroscience,
DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0240-23.2023.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
