30th May 2024
Hearing Sciences – Scottish Section has been awarded a grant by WS Audiology A/S to support a postdoctoral fellowship for Raluca Nicoras; ‘Conversations in dual-task situations: an under-researched aspect of hearing disability and a platform for novel outcome measures’.
Verbal communication often takes place while individuals engage in other activities such as walking, driving, cooking, or eating. When the demands of these tasks overload a person, something has to give. For a person with hearing loss, there is an extra cognitive task involved, namely the reconstruction of partially-perceived speech. This may mean that one task gives way to the other more often for people with hearing loss. Many hearing studies have used classic dual-task methods as a way to demonstrate extra listening effort in people with hearing loss, but have not translated this into thinking about dual tasks in real life. This project will produce a preliminary description of the mechanisms at play in real-life dual-task hearing situations, a typology of its manifestations in the lives of older adults with hearing loss, and the basis for the development of outcome measures applicable in clinical, epidemiological and research contexts.