Cochlear Implanted Listening Effort and Hearing Attention

Recruiting now · Not applicable

Conditions studied: Sensorineural Hearing Loss

In brief

Cochlear implant users perceive mainly sound amplitude modulation cues. Processing of these amplitude modulations can be subject to interferences, so that the perception of a modulation in a target sound can be impaired by a superimposed sound if this sound contains a similar modulation. Such phenomenon, which is observed both in subjects with normal-hearing and in cochlear-implant users, could be explained by difficulties to direct attention to relevant information in complex sound signals. Selective auditory attention also plays a crucial role in speech comprehension in cocktail-party situations where the speech of multiple talkers get mixed at the ear of a listener. Cochlear implant users typically struggle in these cocktail-party situations and report intense listening effort. The present clinical trial aims at evaluating the contribution of selective auditory attention for sound modulations to the listening effort of patients with cochlear implants and of healthy volunteers with normal-hearing during speech perception under cocktail-party-like conditions. Selective auditory attention abilities of patients and controls will be assessed using a psychoacoustical test whereby their ability to detect a target sound amplitude modulation will be measured both in the absence and in the presence of an interfering (i.e. distracting) amplitude modulation occurring in a distant spectral region from that of the target. The effect of this distractor's presence on modulation detection performance will serve as a behavioural index of the subject's auditory attention capacities. The attentional capacity index will then be tested as a predicting factor for the listening effort of the subject during a speech-in-noise consonant identification task. Listening effort will be measured from the pupil dilation response to the presented speech units (pseudowords). This study will enhance our understanding of cochlear implant user's perception and listening effort and will serve as a basis for prognostic tests of listening effort and of implantation success for cochlear implant candidates, based on a simple measurement of auditory attentional abilities.

Key facts

Study ID: NCT04733950
Run by: Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris
People needed: 170
Starts: 2021-12-08
Expected to finish: 2026-02-22
Last updated by the study team: 2025-01-13

Who can join

Age: 18 and older, up to 80. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may qualify if…

Arm 1: patient with Cochlear Implant
Having a unilateral Oticon Medical cochlear implant
Duration of use of the implant of 6 months or more
Disyllabic word recognition score of at least 40% on average in silence, to limit "floor" effects in hearing tests.
Disyllabic word recognition score not exceeding 30% on the contra-lateral ear alone, aided or not, in silence.
Arm 2: volunteers with normal hearing
Normal tonal audiometry for the age
For both
Age between 18 and 80 years old
Mother tongue : French
Normal vision with or without correction
Absence of eye pathologies (cataracts, nystagmus, amblyopia, macular degeneration).
Not taking psychotropic drugs or drugs affecting the parasympathetic nervous system
Absence of pathology or neurological history (especially head trauma, stroke).
Information and signing of a consent prior to any act related to research

You may not qualify if…

For both groups, ensuring the reliability of the pupillometric measurement (Winn et al., 2018):
Pathologies of the eye: cataracts, nystagmus, amblyopia, macular degeneration.
Taking psychotropic drugs and / or drugs affecting the parasympathetic nervous system
Neurological pathology (in particular head trauma or stroke) associated with an alteration of cognitive functions or history thereof that may affect the stability of the gaze, the congruence of eye movements, pupillary dilation or with an alteration of cognitive functions
Others criteria:
No affiliation (or being entitled) to a social security scheme
Person under State Medical Assistance
Person under legal protection (tutorship, curatorship, other…) or under family authorization

Where it is running

Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris — Paris, France (enrolling)

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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