ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1655826
This article is part of the Research TopicImpact of Acoustic Environments and Noise on Auditory PerceptionView all 14 articles
Spatial Separation Enhances Speech Intelligibility but Increases Listening Effort with Session-Dependent Variability in Pupillometric Measures
Provisionally accepted
- 1Psychology, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, La Crosse, United States
- 2University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States
- 3North American Research Lab, MED-EL, Durham, NC, United States
- 4Department of Surgery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States
- 5Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States
- 6University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center, Madison, United States
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Abstract Our understanding of the cognitive load of listening effort has been advanced by combining speech intelligibility and pupillometry measures. However, the reliability of pupil dilation metrics in complex listening scenarios like spatial release from masking (SRM) remains uncertain. This study investigated how spatial separation of sound sources impacts listening effort (via peak pupil dilation, PPD) and speech intelligibility. Here, speech intelligibility and listening effort were simultaneously measured under co-located and symmetric, spatially-separated conditions at varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Results showed that although spatial separation improved speech intelligibility, it did not yield a corresponding reduction in listening effort. Instead, listening effort increased as SNR became more challenging. Furthermore, test– retest reliability was moderate-to-high for speech intelligibility but only moderate-to-low for PPD, with greater consistency observed at more challenging SNRs. These results suggest that obtaining stable PPD measures within an SRM paradigm may be difficult to achieve. These findings indicate that obtaining stable PPD measures within an SRM paradigm can be challenging. Test session reliability is limited when combining SRM paradigms with measures of listening effort, which may reduce statistical power due to factors such as sample size, number of trials, and sessions tested. This is further limited by the relatively small and homogeneous sample of young, typical hearing adults. Future studies should include a larger and more diverse participant group to assess the generalizability of these results. Word Count: 240
Keywords: Spatial release from masking (SRM), Test retest reliability, Pupillometery, listening effort, binaural hearing
Received: 28 Jun 2025; Accepted: 14 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thakkar, Knoepker, Dennison, Roche and Litovsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tanvi Thakkar, tthakkar@uwlax.edu
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