ArticleTrends in hearing
Pupillometry as an Objective Measure of Sustained Attention in Young and Older Listeners.
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 32 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The Relative Accuracy of Different Methods for Measuring Mind Wandering Subtypes: A Systematic Review.Brain and behavior · 2025Pooled it
- Exploring the Correlations Between Measures of Listening Effort in Adults and Children: A Systematic Review with Narrative Synthesis.Trends in hearingPooled it
- Beyond vigilance: A dual-process perspective on visual sustained attention.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- eyeris: A Flexible, Extensible, and Reproducible Pupillometry Preprocessing Framework in R.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Phoneme Monitoring in Developmental Dyslexia: Pupillometric Evidence for Cognitive Rather than Acoustic Origins of Phonological Deficits.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Acoustic Salience Drives Pupillary Dynamics in an Interrupted, Reverberant Task.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Dynamics of the attentional blink in preverbal infants.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cortical Network Activity Associated With Different Types of Word Recognition Errors by Older Adults.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Investigating the Neural Correlates of the Attention Training Technique Using a Novel fMRI Paradigm for Measuring Attentional Control.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The relationship between category-level neural differentiation and exploratory eye movements in healthy young and older adults.Neurobiology of aging · 2025Article
- Location-specific neural facilitation in marmoset auditory cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Evidence of physiological changes associated with single-session pre-frontal tDCS: a pilot study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- From pre-processing to advanced dynamic modeling of pupil data.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Sensory modality and information domain contribute jointly to dual-task interference between working memory and perceptual processing.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Article
- Eye Movements Decrease during Effortful Speech Listening.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Neural α Oscillations and Pupil Size Differentially Index Cognitive Demand under Competing Audiovisual Task Conditions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Time Scales and Moments of Listening Effort Revealed in Pupillometry.Seminars in hearing · 2023Review
- Pupillometry to Assess Auditory Sensation in Guinea Pigs.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2023Article
- Use of the first-acquired language modulates pupil size in the processing of island constraint violations.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ability to sustain attention on a task-relevant sound source while avoiding distraction from concurrent sounds is fundamental to listening in crowded environments. We aimed to (a) devise an experimental paradigm with which this aspect of listening can be isolated and (b) evaluate the applicability of pupillometry as an objective measure of sustained attention in young and older populations. We designed a paradigm that continuously measured behavioral responses and pupillometry during 25-s trials. Stimuli contained a number of concurrent, spectrally distinct tone streams. On each trial, participants detected gaps in one of the streams while resisting distraction from the others. Behavior demonstrated increasing difficulty with time-on-task and with number/proximity of distractor streams. In young listeners (N = 20; aged 18 to 35 years), pupil diameter (on the group and individual level) was dynamically modulated by instantaneous task difficulty: Periods where behavioral performance revealed a strain on sustained attention were accompanied by increased pupil diameter. Only trials on which participants performed successfully were included in the pupillometry analysis so that the observed effects reflect task demands as opposed to failure to attend. In line with existing reports, we observed global changes to pupil dynamics in the older group (N = 19; aged 63 to 79 years) including decreased pupil diameter, limited dilation range, and reduced temporal variability. However, despite these changes, older listeners showed similar effects of attentive tracking to those observed in the young listeners. Overall, our results demonstrate that pupillometry can be a reliable and time-sensitive measure of attentive tracking over long durations in both young and (with caveats) older listeners.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.