Aging effects on listening effort in cochlear-implant users

Cochlear-implant (CI) users often report that listening to speech can be exhausting. Greater listening effort can occur with a degraded acoustic signal even in individuals with normal hearing, but age-related changes in auditory processing and individual differences in cognitive abilities may exacerbate the effort required to process a degraded signal. Therefore, we examined the effects of aging and individual differences in cognitive abilities on listening effort (measured with pupillometry) in two experiments. In the first experiment, we measured how changes in signal degradation (spectral resolution) affect listening effort in younger and older adults with normal hearing recalling CI-simulated (vocoded) sentences. In the second experiment, we examined how memory load and cognitive abilities (individual differences in working memory scores) affect listening effort in CI users recalling digit strings. It was hypothesized that increased effort would be observed with greater signal degradation, memory load, and age, and that individual differences would relate to working memory scores. Preliminary results are consistent with the hypothesized effects. These results support the clinical relevance of listening effort in older CI users and provide motivation for development of clinical practices to reduce listening effort in this population.