Abstract
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in studying listening effort. Research on listening effort intersects with the development of active theories of speech perception and contributes to the broader endeavor of understanding speech perception within the context of neuroscientific theories of perception, attention, and effort. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the problem, researchers vary widely in their precise conceptualization of the catch-all term listening effort. Very recent consensus work stresses the relationship between listening effort and the allocation of cognitive resources, providing a conceptual link to current cognitive neuropsychological theories associating effort with the allocation of selective attention. By linking listening effort to attentional effort, we enable the application of a taxonomy of external and internal attention to the characterization of effortful listening. More specifically, we use a vectorial model to decompose the demand causing listening effort into its mutually orthogonal external and internal components and map the relationship between demanded and exerted effort by means of a resource-limiting term that can represent the influence of motivation as well as vigilance and arousal. Due to its quantitative nature and easy graphical interpretation, this model can be applied to a broad range of problems dealing with listening effort. As such, we conclude that the model provides a good starting point for further research on effortful listening within a more differentiated neuropsychological framework.
Highlights
Under optimal circumstances, understanding speech can seem automatic and effortless
In this article we propose a conceptual model of the contribution of varieties of attention to the determination of listening effort more broadly considered
While the details of such a characterization must be left for subsequent work, even the more conceptual model presented here can be related to a variety of major theories addressing the intersection between limited resource capacity, selective attention, speech perception, and listening effort, as discussed
Summary
Under optimal circumstances, understanding speech can seem automatic and effortless. conditions are rarely optimal, and a wide variety of factors have been identified that, individually or in combination, may serve to make understanding speech more difficult. When using a functional programming representation, an active listening task such as speech perception can be modeled as a constrained dual optimization problem (maximizing speech perception outcomes while minimizing the exerted effort) with motivation-driven objective functionals that depend on the defined vectorial demand and having the resource limitations as constraints.
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