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COGNITIVE SPARE CAPACITY AS A MEASURE OF
LISTENING EFFORT
Stefan Stenfelt
1,3
1
Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linkoping University, Sweden
2
Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linkoping University, Sweden
3
Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Linkoping University, Sweden
4
Oticon A/S, Research Centre Eriksholm, Snekkersten, Denmark
Publication date: 2011-06-30
J Hear Sci 2011;1(2):47-49
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
There has been a recent interest in listening effort as a factor to be taken into account in the audiological clinic. However, the
term “listening effort” is poorly determined and needs to be defined before it can be used as a clinical or research tool. One
way of understanding listening effort is in terms of the cognitive resources expended during listening. Cognitive capacity is
finite and thus if cognitive capacity is used up during the act of listening to speech there will be fewer cognitive resources left
to process the content of the message conveyed. We have introduced the term Cognitive Spare Capacity (CSC) to refer to residual cognitive capacity once successful listening has taken place. This extended abstract describes the work we have carried
out to date on measures of CSC for research and clinical use. In the course of this work we have developed tests to assess the
role of memory load, executive function and audiovisual integration in CSC under challenging conditions. When these tests
are fully developed, our aim is that they should allow objective individual assessment of listening effort in cognitive terms. Results to date indicate that under challenging conditions, CSC is an arena for executive processing of temporarily stored information; it is related to individual working memory capacity and can be enhanced by hearing aid signal processing.
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