Schedule of Events | Symposia

Graduate Student Award Winner

Attentional Dynamics Drive Narrative Lingering Under Effortful Listening Conditions

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ryan Panela^1,2 (ryan.panela@utoronto.ca), Alexander Barnett^2,3, Björn Herrmann^1,2; ¹Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Academy for Research and Education, ²Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, ³Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University

Investigations into speech-comprehension difficulties often focus on intelligibility of short, disconnected sentences, limiting generalization to real-life listening. Novel approaches to understanding naturalistic speech listening are critical for insight into impaired speech processing. Research has demonstrated that experiences linger in our minds, spontaneously returning to thought after their conclusion. This phenomenon, driven by attention, is more likely to persist when situational meaning is extracted rather than low-level semantics; however, this has not yet been investigated in the auditory domain under challenging listening conditions. In the current study, participants (N=40, 18-38 years) listened to three 5-minute stories overlaid with twelve-talker babble in three conditions, ranging from easy to difficult speech intelligibility: clear, +4dB SNR, and -2dB SNR. Before and after each story, participants completed a free association task, freely typing words for three minutes. Semantic similarity analyses quantified how narrative themes and direct words appeared in participants’ associations. Results showed decreased intelligibility with more challenging listening conditions. Narrative lingering occurred across all conditions, with greater semantic similarity for direct narrative words than themes. Challenging listening conditions resulted in a decrease in lingering of direct narrative words, but theme words presented similarly across all SNRs. The results suggest that theme words, which encapsulate narrative meaning, are less dependent on precise language and may be retrieved through generalized representation, making them more robust to noise-related disruptions. These results reveal a link between background noise and auditory memory as cognitive load and reduced intelligibility may disrupt narrative lingering, accelerating decay in representations of speech content.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory