Does noise sensitivity mediate physiological measures of listening effort?

Abstract

Listening to speech in background noise is cognitively demanding and has been shown to engage frontal cortical regions associated with selective attention and cognitive control. However, especially for noise-sensitive individuals, the presence of interfering or distracting noise may also provoke anxiety or frustration, and these same frontal cortical regions also participate in brain networks associated with anxiety and distress. Thus, it is not clear whether previous results showing enhanced frontal activity when listening to speech in noise reflect cognitive effort, noise annoyance, or both. In order to investigate the possibility of dissociating these two aspects of listening to speech in adverse conditions, we will examine the degree to which measures of individual differences in personality traits, noise sensitivity, and cognitive capacities (attention, working memory) predict behavioral and physiological measures associated with listening effort and affective response. Specifically, we will record cardiovascular and electroencephalographic responses to listening to speech in three levels of two types of industrial background noise. The noise types differ only in terms of the relative degree of acoustic properties associated with noise annoyance (tonality, sharpness) instantiated mainly through differences at frequencies not overlapping with those of the speech target.