Pupillometry as a measure for listening effort in children: a review

Purpose: Listening effort can be defined as the deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles when carrying out a listening task. Requiring mental resources, it may detract from other types of cognitive activities, leading to a general worsening of cognitive performances. The aim of this review is to provide information about how to use pupillometry to explore listening effort in children too and discuss the suitability of this technique when measuring listening effort in this population.Materials and methods: After reporting a brief overview of pupillometry and listening effort, results from researchers concerning listening effort and children will be presented first to then go deeper into the research on the topic by means of pupillometry.Results: Listening effort has a direct link with cognitive resources, as when the environment is surrounded by noise, the cognitive system requires additional effort and consequently the cognitive abilities required for the task that is being conducted becomes impoverished. This effect becomes more evident in the case of children, and has important consequences on speech perception and scholastic performance.Conclusions: In children, listening effort is a major issue, as they are still developing mature language skills that can help them compensating for inaccurate speech recognition. Since children spend most of their time in noisy environments, it is very important to examine the consequences of listening in acoustically inadequate conditions. Pupillometry could be a good way of reflecting the effects of noise on children's cognitive abilities by adding more objective evidence to the topic.