Objectives: Individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) often report that listening requires high levels of effort. Listening effort can increase with decreasing spectral resolution, which occurs when listening with a CI, and can also increase with age. What is not clear is whether these factors interact; older CI listeners potentially experience even higher listening effort with greater signal degradation than younger CI listeners. This study used pupillometry as a physiological index of listening effort to examine whether age, spectral resolution, and their interaction affect listening effort in a simulation of CI listening.

Design: Fifteen younger normal-hearing listeners (ages 18 to 31 years) and 15 older normal-hearing listeners (ages 65 to 75 years) participated in this experiment; they had normal hearing thresholds from 0.25 to 4 kHz. Participants repeated sentences presented in quiet that were either unprocessed or vocoded, simulating CI listening. Stimuli frequency spectra were limited to below 4 kHz (to control for effects of age-related high-frequency hearing loss), and spectral resolution was decreased by decreasing the number of vocoder channels, with 32-, 16-, and 8-channel conditions. Behavioral speech recognition scores and pupil dilation were recorded during this task. In addition, cognitive measures of working memory and processing speed were obtained to examine if individual differences in these measures predicted changes in pupil dilation.

Results: For trials where the sentence was recalled correctly, there was a significant interaction between age and spectral resolution, with significantly greater pupil dilation in the older normal-hearing listeners for the 8- and 32-channel vocoded conditions. Cognitive measures did not predict pupil dilation.

Conclusions: There was a significant interaction between age and spectral resolution, such that older listeners appear to exert relatively higher listening effort than younger listeners when the signal is highly degraded, with the largest effects observed in the eight-channel condition. The clinical implication is that older listeners may be at higher risk for increased listening effort with a CI.