Objective Measures of Cognitive Hearing – Listening attention (EEG)

Measuring brain activity using EEG and Ear-EEG is applied in our research to learn more about listening attention and cognitive load in people with hearing impairment.

In everyday life, we are constantly challenged to follow our conversational partner and suppress other unwanted sounds. Regardless of the listening situation, whether it is a busy office, crowded restaurant or congested street, sound reaching our ears is not from our conversational partner only. The conversation is accompanied by other unwanted sounds.

Whereas listening in such challenging situations can be difficult even for listeners with intact hearing, people with hearing loss are notorious for their difficulties in attending and understanding their conversational partners. Hearing devices are supposed to help the listener to better receive and attend the speech from their conversational partners.
Our main objective in this part of our research is to understand when hard of hearing individuals fail to attend and understand the speech in different listening situations and to evaluate the effectiveness of hearing devices and their signal processing, which are supposed to help the user understanding desired speech.