The Effects of Cueing Temporal and Spatial Attention on Word Recognition in a Complex Listening Task in Hearing-Impaired Listeners

In a complex listening situation such as a multiperson conversation, the demands on an individual's attention are considerable: There will often be many sounds occurring simultaneously, with continual changes in source and direction. A laboratory analog of this was designed to measure the benefit that helping attention (by visual cueing) would have on word identification. These words were presented unpredictably but were sometimes cued with a temporal cue or a temporal-and-spatial cue. Two groups of hearing-impaired, older-adult listeners participated, 57 unaided and 19 aided. There was a small effect of cueing: The cues gave a 2% benefit in word identification. A variety of subsidiary measures were collected, including the Test of Everyday Attention and the Speech, Spatial, & Qualities of Hearing Questionnaire, but their links with the benefits of cueing were few. The results demonstrate the difficulty of cueing attention to improve word recognition in a complex listening situation.