Towards an objective metric for assessing communication ability

Description

Current strategies for evaluating the benefit of hearing aids use testing paradigms based
on passive listening. However, such paradigms are unlikely to represent the challenges that hearing-
impaired people experience in everyday conversations. In this study, we propose a new collaborative
group task to measure the communicative ability of individual members of an interacting group.
Participants were asked to judge their own confidence in a list of binary general-knowledge
questions. Participants would then discuss the questions in groups of three and would afterwards
answer the same questions individually. Based on previous research on similar tasks, we propose a
formal cognitive model to predict a groups’ post-conversation confidence response from its
members’ pre-conversation responses. Given the pre- and post-conversation responses, we use
maximum likelihood estimation to derive model parameters related to the weight that the
participants give to each other’s pre-conversation responses. The estimated weights are compared
between conditions with conversations with versus without multi-talker background noise. We show
that the weights that individuals give to their own pre-conversation responses are significantly
higher in noisy conditions. This indicates that the noisy condition imposes an inhibitory effect on
communication which causes individuals to stick to their own prior beliefs rather than adopting
those of their interlocutors. The proposed method may serve as an objective measure of the
difficulty of conversing in a given environment. The method will be used in future studies to
investigate the effect of hearing impairment on individual’s conversational ability.

Period	21 Nov 2022
Event title	ARCHES Meeting 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	Oldenburg, GermanyShow on map