Seeing the Talker's Face Improves Free Recall of Speech for Young Adults With Normal Hearing but Not Older Adults With Hearing Loss.
Seeing the talker's face improves speech understanding in noise, possibly releasing resources for cognitive processing. We investigated whether it improves free recall of spoken two-digit numbers.



Twenty younger adults with normal hearing and 24 older adults with hearing loss listened to and subsequently recalled lists of 13 two-digit numbers, with alternating male and female talkers. Lists were presented in quiet as well as in stationary and speech-like noise at a signal-to-noise ratio giving approximately 90% intelligibility. Amplification compensated for loss of audibility.



Seeing the talker's face improved free recall performance for the younger but not the older group. Poorer performance in background noise was contingent on individual differences in working memory capacity. The effect of seeing the talker's face did not differ in quiet and noise.



We have argued that the absence of an effect of seeing the talker's face for older adults with hearing loss may be due to modulation of audiovisual integration mechanisms caused by an interaction between task demands and participant characteristics. In particular, we suggest that executive task demands and interindividual executive skills may play a key role in determining the benefit of seeing the talker's face during a speech-based cognitive task.
Mary
M
Rudner
Sushmit
S
Mishra
Stefan
S
Stenfelt
Thomas
T
Lunner
Jerker
J
Rönnberg
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000523:psychology*; D006320:Hearing Tests; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D009622:Noise; D011932:Reading; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult