Miranda Cleary

As humans age, circadian/diurnal preferences typically shift to earlier times of day. Recent research identifies the fatigue associated with listening effort as a fundamental concern among listeners with hearing impairment. The impact of time-of-day on perceiving speech under challenging listening conditions is, however, not well established for older listeners with hearing loss. A study was therefore initiated to measure time-of-day effects. Experienced cochlear-implant users with postlingual onsets of hearing loss completed several effortful perceptual tasks either in the morning, mid-afternoon, or at both timepoints. Sentence pairs were presented in quiet listening conditions and listeners were cued either before or after presentation, to repeat the first, second, or both sentences. Speech-in-noise (+10 SNR) scores for single sentences were also recorded. Following this, information was collected regarding time-of-day preferences, sleep habits, and fatigue, along with standardized measures of visual attention, processing speed, and working memory. Preliminary data do not currently bear out participants' intuitions regarding performance in the morning versus afternoon. Although memory load and target uncertainty reduce scores, performance across timepoints appears similar, irrespective of time-of-day-preference. Additional data for speech-in-noise will be reported.