Enhanced environments for psychophysical evaluation and training

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Project Summary Speech in noise tests have traditionally involved 1) unrealistic maskers such as broadband noise presented from the same spatial location as the target speech, and 2) unengaging reward structures. Our overarching hypothesis is that the experience of listeners in their daily lives will be more strongly related to performance if the laboratory tests are enhanced by increasing the realism of the testing environments and introducing game- like interfaces. The main goal of this project is to determine which enhancements have the greatest impact on the relationship with listener complaints, and which listener abilities (auditory and cognitive) mediate and modulate this relationship. Enhanced environments will be tested that 1) simulate real-world experiences by conducting assessments in synthetic environments that include both auditory and visual stimuli and 2) introduce game-like elements that are more rewarding and motivating for the listener. Understanding how different participants respond to a variety of enhancements will provide essential new information about the ways in which realistic experiences differ from traditional laboratory tests and the ways that rewards and motivation influence variability of test results as well as relationships with self-report. Experiments will involve younger listeners with normal hearing, older listeners with a range of hearing abilities from normal to severely impaired, and a group of listeners with a history of mild traumatic brain injury. These participants will provide a wide range of performance on measures of auditory and cognitive abilities, which can then be used to better understand any effects of the enhancements on self-reported ability to function in complex listening environments. Upon completion of this project there will exist, freely available, an extensive set of enhanced auditory assessments that are more engaging and more realistic than what is currently available and that run on inexpensive consumer-grade equipment. This project will establish for these enhanced tests both 1) established ranges of normal performance as a function of age and hearing loss, and 2) known relationships to various established tests of speech in noise. The modeling work associated with this project will reveal which auditory and cognitive abilities are associated with deviations from normal performance and self-reported difficulties hearing in adverse listening environments that are great than would be expected.