How noise impacts decision-making in triadic conversations

Activity: Talks and presentations › Conference presentations

Description

Hearing loss is associated with depression and is one of the top risk factors for developing dementia. This might be caused by increased difficulty with communication, which can lead to social isolation. Current paradigms of
diagnosing hearing loss rely heavily on passive listening tests, where no conversational partner is present. Such tests do not provide information about whether a given person has challenges with speech communication. In this exploratory study, we investigated the potential of using task-oriented dialogues to evaluate how information exchange - a core aspect of communication - is affected by background noise. Ten triads of normal hearing participants were recruited. Each participant first individually answered a series of binary general-knowledge questions. Afterwards, they discussed the questions in groups of three, and finally, they answered the same questions individually again. We found a population-level effect that participants were more likely to adopt opposing views from other group members when background noise was present. The results show that noise impacts group decision-making processes in normal hearing individuals. The methods presented can potentially be used to study how other factors, such as hearing loss, cognitive ability or different acoustic conditions, affect the ability to communicate
Period11 Sept 2023
Event titleForum Acusticum 2023
Event typeConference
LocationTorino, ItalyShow on map

Keywords

  • communication
  • triad
  • noise
  • hearing
  • decision-making
  • social cognition

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