How age affects multitasking during complex listening

Background – Having a successful oral conversation does not only depend on good auditory processing abilities. During complex real-life listening situations, cognitive processes like attention, working memory and executive functions as well as the processing of visual (speech) cues are well known to influence perception. Taken together, listeners are required to multitask when facing the daily multitude of auditory and visual cues. The goal of this project is to investigate the effect of multitasking on speech understanding and the cognitive load during listening and to examine the effect of aging on these multitasking processes. Method – Ecologically valid listening scenarios were developed by means of an audio-visual environment, including avatars uttering sentences. The complexity of the listening scenario was controlled in a quantitative way by gradually increasing the amount of tasks participants had to perform simultaneously. In the most difficult situation the participant executed a speech intelligibility task together with three secondary tasks: an auditory localization test, detection of the direction of sounds passing by and short-term memory storage of visual stimuli. Both normal hearing young and middle-aged adults were tested, allowing to investigate potential age-effects on real-life listening. Results & Discussion – Results showed that for normal hearing adults of 18-30 years old, speech intelligibility was robust to the amount of tasks that had to be performed simultaneously. On the contrary, listening effort during speech-processing significantly increased when the listening situation became more complex. Furthermore, results revealed a more prominent impact of multitasking on listening effort for middle-aged adults.status: publishe