ArticleTrends in hearing
Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy as a Measure of Listening Effort in Older Adults Who Use Hearing Aids.
Article in Trends in hearing. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring the Correlations Between Measures of Listening Effort in Adults and Children: A Systematic Review with Narrative Synthesis.Trends in hearingPooled it
- Rapid Brain Adaptation to Hearing Amplification: A Randomized Crossover Trial of Personal Sound Amplification Products.Trends in hearingTrial
- Cortical activation during auditory working memory varies with hearing aid use status in age-related hearing loss.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Brain benefits of deep learning-based noise management in experienced hearing aid users using functional near infrared spectroscopy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Associations between physiological indicators of cochlear deafferentation and listening effort in military Veterans with normal audiograms.Hearing research · 2025Article
- The cingulate cortex facilitates auditory perception under challenging listening conditions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A narrative review of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) applications in hearing loss, tinnitus and vestibular disorders.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Review
- Effects of age on the neural correlates of auditory working memory in cochlear implant users.PloS one · 2025Article
- Neuroplasticity of Speech-in-Noise Processing in Older Adults Assessed by Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS).Brain topography · 2024Article
- Neurologic Complications in Adult Cancer Survivorship.Seminars in neurology · 2024Article
- Role of the prefrontal cortex in musical and verbal short-term memory: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Combining Multiple Psychophysiological Measures of Listening Effort: Challenges and Recommendations.Seminars in hearing · 2023Review
- Brightening the Study of Listening Effort with Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy: A Scoping Review.Seminars in hearing · 2023Article
- A review of auditory processing and cognitive change during normal ageing, and the implications for setting hearing aids for older adults.Frontiers in neurology · 2023Review
- Intracranial electrophysiology of spectrally degraded speech in the human cortex.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Investigating effortful speech perception using fNIRS and pupillometry measures.Current research in neurobiology · 2022Article
- Effects of degraded speech processing and binaural unmasking investigated using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).PloS one · 2022Article
- Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Listening Effort in Young Children with Cochlear Implants.Audiology research · 2021Article
- Analysis methods for measuring passive auditory fNIRS responses generated by a block-design paradigm.Neurophotonics · 2021Article
- Effect of Light on Cognitive Function During a Stroop Task Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.Phenomics (Cham, Switzerland) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Listening effort may be reduced when hearing aids improve access to the acoustic signal. However, this possibility is difficult to evaluate because many neuroimaging methods used to measure listening effort are incompatible with hearing aid use. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which can be used to measure the concentration of oxygen in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), appears to be well-suited to this application. The first aim of this study was to establish whether fNIRS could measure cognitive effort during listening in older adults who use hearing aids. The second aim was to use fNIRS to determine if listening effort, a form of cognitive effort, differed depending on whether or not hearing aids were used when listening to sound presented at 35 dB SL (flat gain). Sixteen older adults who were experienced hearing aid users completed an auditory n-back task and a visual n-back task; both tasks were completed with and without hearing aids. We found that PFC oxygenation increased with n-back working memory demand in both modalities, supporting the use of fNIRS to measure cognitive effort during listening in this population. PFC oxygenation was weakly and nonsignificantly correlated with self-reported listening effort and reaction time, respectively, suggesting that PFC oxygenation assesses a dimension of listening effort that differs from these other measures. Furthermore, the extent to which hearing aids reduced PFC oxygenation in the left lateral PFC was positively correlated with age and pure-tone average thresholds. The implications of these findings as well as future directions are discussed.
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