Listening effort and recording of parasympathetic heart control during sentence recognition: Pilot study

Abstract

Introduction: Psychophysiological measures of the autonomic nervous system in response to auditory tasks may provide a means of quantifying the effects of listening effort. Objective: To compare parasympathetic modulation of the heart rate in different listening situations and to determine if the heart rate variability is a sensitive psychophysiological index to measure listening effort. Methods: Pilot, observational, transversal and prospective study. 14 normal healthy young adults, both genders and between 18 and 30 years of age, participated in this study. They answered the anamnesis and performed pure tone audiometry to verify hearing thresholds. In order to record HRV, it was placed the cardiofrequency transducer tape in the xiphoid process region and this record was collected for 10 minutes for the “rest”, “post-recovery of sentence recognition in quiet” and “post-recovery of sentence recognition in noise”. Recognition task was performed using two lists of sentences presented in a randomized way, binaural, in the quiet listening condition and in a signal-to-noise ratio of -5 dB, and HRV was also recorded for a period of two minutes. ANOVA repeated measures test was applied followed by the Bonferroni posttest to compare the RMSSD index in the different HRV recording moments. Results: Statistical analysis showed that there was no significant difference in HRV recording at different moments, including the sentence recognition task in noise, considered the most arduous task. Conclusion: For this sample, the HRV recording was not considered a sensitive index for auditory effort measurement.