Defining and Enhancing Operationally Relevant Auditory Processing Skills
Abstract
Military aviation requires its professionals to perform several hearing critical tasks (HCTs) throughout a mission. Such tasks involve the need to hear an excessive amount of auditory information and process it quickly in order to make crucial decisions. Compounding the difficulty of these tasks is the fact that pilots and aircrew must perform HCTs in a hazardous and excessively noisy operational environment. The goal of the current study was to determine if a commercially available CBAT program could enhance speech understanding (i.e., speech recognition or speech intelligibility) in noise and auditory working memory in Army aviators. Despite the limitations and challenges associated with this study, we are able to take away a few key points. The training program employed did not yield enhancements in speech intelligibility in noise or auditory working memory performance. The results of this study, however, are not sufficient to rule out the efficacy of this training type in this population of aircrew given the small sample size as well as limitations in exploring individual differences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 07, 2021
- Accession Number
- AD1150868
Entities
People
- Amanda M. Kelley
- Bobby Bowers
- Efrem Reeves
- Heath Jones
- Hillary A Plummer
- Kevin Baugher
Organizations
- Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education
- United States Army Aeromedical Research Lab