Optimisation of visual reinforcement audiometry: a scoping review.

OBJECTIVE: Visual reinforcement audiometry (VRA) is a well-established behavioural test used to assess hearing in infants and young children. This scoping review aimed to summarise the evidence for different approaches to optimising and improving the effectiveness of VRA for clinical practice. DESIGN: A pre-registered scoping review was conducted. STUDY SAMPLE: Fifty-nine original articles were included in the review. RESULTS: The review identified a number of factors which improved response behaviour, such as increased variety and complexity of visual reinforcers, short reinforcer durations, and providing breaks. Intermittent conditioning, where as few as 50% of conditioning trials were rewarded, did not have an impact on response behaviour, and neither did the (suprathreshold) presentation level used during conditioning. More responses were achieved for younger (around 12 months) than older (around 18-24 months) infants. Once infants were developmentally ready to condition to play audiometry, this allowed for a more comprehensive hearing evaluation. CONCLUSIONS: VRA is a successful behavioural hearing test for most infants of developmental age around 7-24 months, with well-established protocols describing its clinical implementation. Further evidence is needed to assess potential benefits of different reinforcers, different auditory stimuli (e.g. filtered familiar sounds), and technologies to assist response detection.

Preschool children's evaluations of their own unjustified requests.

To make a fair request, requesters should consider the perspective of the requestee and contrast his or her needs with their own needs. Making an unjustified request (e.g., requesting something we do not need but the requestee does need) can induce some negative feelings such as guilt. Here, we investigated whether making unjustified requests resulted in negative emotions in 3- and 5-year-old children. Participants (N = 83; 34 girls) requested resources that they did or did not need from an experimenter who either did or did not need them. Both age groups were slower and more hesitant to make an unjustified request (children did not need the sticker, but the experimenter did) and also showed lowered body posture when making an unjustified request compared with when making a justified request (children needed the sticker, but the experimenter did not). Three-year-olds showed more pronounced changes in their posture, whereas 5-year-olds' emotional expression was overall more blunted. Rather, older children relied more on verbal indirect utterances (e.g., "You've got lovely stickers"), as opposed to direct requests (e.g., "Can I have that sticker?"), when making unjustified requests. These results suggest that preschool children already apply impartial normative standards to their requests for help, account for the fairness of their requests, and consider the needs of others when requesting.

Impacts of face coverings on communication: an indirect impact of COVID-19.

OBJECTIVE: To understand the impact of face coverings on hearing and communication. DESIGN: An online survey consisting of closed-set and open-ended questions distributed within the UK to gain insights into experiences of interactions involving face coverings, and of the impact of face coverings on communication. SAMPLE: Four hundred and sixty members of the general public were recruited via snowball sampling. People with hearing loss were intentionally oversampled to more thoroughly assess the effect of face coverings in this group. RESULTS: With few exceptions, participants reported that face coverings negatively impacted hearing, understanding, engagement, and feelings of connection with the speaker. Impacts were greatest when communicating in medical situations. People with hearing loss were significantly more impacted than those without hearing loss. Face coverings impacted communication content, interpersonal connectedness, and willingness to engage in conversation; they increased anxiety and stress, and made communication fatiguing, frustrating and embarrassing - both as a speaker wearing a face covering, and when listening to someone else who is wearing one. CONCLUSIONS: Face coverings have far-reaching impacts on communication for everyone, but especially for people with hearing loss. These findings illustrate the need for communication-friendly face-coverings, and emphasise the need to be communication-aware when wearing a face covering.

Perception and automatic detection of wind-induced microphone noise.

Wind can induce noise on microphones, causing problems for users of hearing aids and for those making recordings outdoors. Perceptual tests in the laboratory and via the Internet were carried out to understand what features of wind noise are important to the perceived audio quality of speech recordings. The average A-weighted sound pressure level of the wind noise was found to dominate the perceived degradation of quality, while gustiness was mostly unimportant. Large degradations in quality were observed when the signal to noise ratio was lower than about 15 dB. A model to allow an estimation of wind noise level was developed using an ensemble of decision trees. The model was designed to work with a single microphone in the presence of a variety of foreground sounds. The model outputted four classes of wind noise: none, low, medium, and high. Wind free examples were accurately identified in 79% of cases. For the three classes with noise present, on average 93% of samples were correctly assigned. A second ensemble of decision trees was used to estimate the signal to noise ratio and thereby infer the perceived degradation caused by wind noise.

Pupil Dilation and Object Permanence in Infants.

This paper examines the relative merits of looking time and pupil diameter measures in the study of early cognitive abilities of infants. Ten-month-old infants took part in a modified version of the classic drawbridge experiment used to study object permanence (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The study involved a factorial design where angle of rotation and presence or absence of an object were crossed. Looking time results are consistent with previous work and could suggest object permanence if one ignored data from all cells of the factorial design. When all cells are considered, the data rather suggest a perceptual interpretation. Dynamic changes in pupil diameter uniquely support this interpretation, illustrating which aspects of events (and when) infants primarily respond to. Overall, the results fail to support object permanence in 10-month-olds, and pupil dilation provides a much finer-grained interpretation of infants' information processing, relative to looking time.

But that's possible! Infants, pupils, and impossible events.

Infants' expectations of the world around them have been extensively assessed through the violation of expectation paradigm and related habituation tasks. Typically, in these tasks, longer looking to impossible events following familiarisation with possible equivalents is taken to reflect surprise at their occurrence, thus revealing infants' knowledge. In this study, the role of learning during the task itself is explored by switching the archetypal approach on its head and familiarising infants to impossible events. In a partial replication of Jackson and Sirois (2009), nine-month-old infants were presented with short video clips of toy trains moving around a circular track. A tunnel over a short section of the track meant trains were briefly occluded as they completed a circuit. In impossible versions of events, the train switched colours while occluded by the tunnel. Both looking times and pupil dilation were used as dependent measures. Using a factorial design in which perceptual (novelty-familiarity) and conceptual (possible-impossible) variables were independently and jointly analysed, we show that infants showed greater responding to possible events than to impossible events following familiarisation. Pupil dilation data successfully allowed for more precise interpretation of infants' perception of events than could have been achieved through looking times alone. These findings suggest a central role for learning in violation of expectation tasks, and also further support the use of pupil dilation as a dependent measure in infancy work.

Microphone Handling Noise: Measurements of Perceptual Threshold and Effects on Audio Quality.

A psychoacoustic experiment was carried out to test the effects of microphone handling noise on perceived audio quality. Handling noise is a problem affecting both amateurs using their smartphones and cameras, as well as professionals using separate microphones and digital recorders. The noises used for the tests were measured from a variety of devices, including smartphones, laptops and handheld microphones. The signal features that characterise these noises are analysed and presented. The sounds include various types of transient, impact noises created by tapping or knocking devices, as well as more sustained sounds caused by rubbing. During the perceptual tests, listeners auditioned speech podcasts and were asked to rate the degradation of any unwanted sounds they heard. A representative design test methodology was developed that tried to encourage everyday rather than analytical listening. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the handling noise events was shown to be the best predictor of quality degradation. Other factors such as noise type or background noise in the listening environment did not significantly affect quality ratings. Podcast, microphone type and reproduction equipment were found to be significant but only to a small extent. A model allowing the prediction of degradation from the SNR is presented. The SNR threshold at which 50% of subjects noticed handling noise was found to be 4.2 ± 0.6 dBA. The results from this work are important for the understanding of our perception of impact sound and resonant noises in recordings, and will inform the future development of an automated predictor of quality for handling noise.