Hearing in a social context: Understanding predictive mechanisms in communicative interaction

交谈是发展社会依恋的基础，如果无法与他人交谈，那将是毁灭性的。与他人交谈不仅能改善心理健康，还能缓解压力和其他健康问题带来的不良影响。有听力障碍的人报告说，社交孤立和孤独是听力障碍最严重的后果之一，但我们对如何为这些人提供对话支持知之甚少。迄今为止，大多数关于口语和听力行为的研究都是在孤立的情况下对个体进行测试，使用的实验方法不需要他们实际与他人交流。但只有通过在社会背景下研究说和听，我们才能解决特定于对话的认知过程。为了顺利互动，人们必须在心里预测彼此的贡献。如果人们等到谈话对象结束后才开始准备回应，那么谈话就会不那么流畅。然而，听力受损的人在听演讲时使用预测的能力较低，尽管考虑到他们糟糕的听觉输入，他们可以从这种帮助中获益。因此，这个项目的目标是了解我们如何在互动中做出预测，以便确定使听力受损的人更容易交谈的方法。结合行为和神经科学实验将探索人们如何在精神层面和大脑层面的互动中做出预测，我将把这些工作结合起来，产生一个互动中的预测模型。我们还将探索听力障碍患者做出预测的不同之处：听力障碍患者做出预测的时间是否太晚而无法发挥作用，他们对自己的预测缺乏信心，还是他们的预测根本不准确？在接受助听器制造商的培训后，接下来的工作将确定如何将这些发现应用于听力技术，以支持听力障碍人士成功地进行对话。这项工作可能会改变听力设备的最新技术，因此有可能使数百万人的心理健康受益。

Conversation is fundamental for developing social attachments, and if the ability to converse with others breaks down, it can be devastating. Not only does conversation with others improve psychological wellbeing, it also buffers people against the ill-effects of stress and other health issues. People with hearing impairment report social isolation and loneliness as one of its most disabling outcomes, yet we know very little about how to support conversation for people that struggle. To date, the majority of research examining speaking and listening behaviour has tested individuals in isolation, using experimental methods that do not require them to actually engage with someone else. But it is only by investigating speaking and listening in a social context that we can address the cognitive processes specific to conversation. To interact smoothly, people must make mental predictions about each other's contributions. Conversations would be much less fluent if people waited for the person they were talking to to finish before they began preparing their response. Yet people with hearing impairment show reduced use of prediction during speech listening, even though they could particularly benefit from such help given their poor auditory input.The objective of this project is therefore to understand how we make predictions during interaction, in order to identify ways of making conversation easier for people with hearing impairment. Combined behavioural and neuroscientific experiments will explore how people make predictions during interaction at both the mental level and the brain level, and I will draw this work together to generate a model of prediction in interaction. The way that predictions differ with hearing impairment will also be explored: do people with hearing impairment make predictions too late to be useful, are they less confident in their predictions, or are their predictions simply inaccurate? Following training with a hearing device manufacturer, subsequent work will identify how the findings could be implemented in hearing technology to support people with hearing impairment have conversations successfully. This work could transform the state-of-the-art in hearing devices, and therefore has the potential to benefit the psychological wellbeing of millions.