HESP Seminar Series: Dr Lynn Bielski (Walter Reed National Medical Center)

Title: "Modality Effects in Multi-task Listening Environments"

Abstract: Everyday listening situations are complex, requiring listeners to divide sensory and cognitive resources between the desired signal(s) and events in the background. Previous studies have shown that in complex environments auditory-visual (AV) speech perception provides substantial benefits over auditory-alone (AO) speech perception, including faster, more accurate, better recollection, and subjectively less perceptual effort for speech inputs. Given these advantages, it can be predicted that the ability to monitor changes in the background while communicating with a speaker in the foreground would be significantly better in the AV mode compared to AO. To test this assumption, a divided attention task with AV and AO topic-related sentences as the primary task and the detection of silent gaps in a background noise as the secondary task was used. Performance on the gap detection task was evaluated for different gap durations. Results will be discussed in terms of the allocation of sensory and cognitive resources, perceptual effort and potential rehabilitative strategies for those with hearing loss and/or cognitive impairment.