Rapid Brain Adaptation to Hearing Amplification: A Randomized Crossover Trial of Personal Sound Amplification Products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding speech in noise is a common challenge for older adults, often requiring increased listening effort that can deplete cognitive resources and impair higher-order functions. Hearing aids are the gold standard intervention for hearing loss, but cost and accessibility barriers have driven interest in alternatives such as Personal Sound Amplification Products (PSAPs). While PSAPs are not medical devices, they may help reduce listening effort in certain contexts, though supporting evidence remains limited. This study examined the short-term effects of bilateral PSAP use on listening effort using self-report measures and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of alpha-band activity (8-12 Hz) in older adults with and without hearing loss. Twenty-five participants aged 60 to 87 years completed a hearing assessment and a phonological discrimination task under three signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions during two counterbalanced sessions (unaided and aided). Results showed that PSAPs significantly reduced self-reported effort. Alpha activity in the left parietotemporal regions showed event-related desynchronization (ERD) during the task, reflecting brain engagement in response to speech in noise. In the unaided condition, alpha ERD weakened as SNR decreased, with activity approaching baseline. PSAP use moderated this effect, maintaining stronger ERD under the most challenging SNR condition. Reduced alpha ERD was associated with greater self-reported effort, suggesting neural and subjective measures reflect related dimensions of listening demand. These results suggest that even brief PSAP use can reduce perceived and neural markers of listening effort. While not a replacement for hearing aids, PSAPs may offer a means for easing cognitive load during effortful listening. ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT05076045, https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05076045.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".