How noise impacts decision-making in triadic conversations

Description

More than a billion people worldwide currently live with some degree of hearing
loss, and with an ageing world population, this number is likely to rise. Hearing
loss is associated with depression and is one of the top risk factors for developing
dementia. This might be caused by increased difficult with communication, which
can lead to social isolation.
While a person’s ability to communicate efficiently relies heavily on their ability to
hear, it is not solely determined by it. The current paradigm of diagnosing hearing
loss relies heavily on passive listening test, where no conversational partner is
present. This makes it impossible for these tests to inform us about the interactive
aspects of communication, and about whether or not a given individual is having
trouble communicating.
In this study, we investigate the potential of using task-oriented dialogue to
distinguish between hard and easy communication scenarios. The difficulty was
increased by adding background noise designed to resemble a so-called cocktail
party scenario. Ten young normal hearing triads participated in the experiment,
which took place in three phases. First, they privately answered a series of binary
general-knowledge questions individually (e.g., “Which of these two countries has
the most inhabitants?”). Afterwards, they discussed the questions as group, and
finally were asked to answer the same questions individually again. Using these
pre- and post-conversation answers, we propose a formal cognitive model to infer
how participants weight the pre-conversation answers of each group member into
their own post-conversation answer. We show that around half of the participants
in our study exhibited some degree of change in their member weights when
background noise was present. This might indicate that these individuals are
experiencing some degree of difficulty when communicating in this scenario,
causing them to weigh members differently than they would ideally do.

Period	19 May 2023
Event title	DUCOG 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Dubrovnik, CroatiaShow on map