IQ may influence ability to hear voices in noisy places
The relationship between intellectual ability and auditory multitalker speech perception in neurodivergent individuals | PLOS One
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0329581
IQ appears to affect ability to listen in noisy settings - UW Medicine | Newsroom
https://newsroom.uw.edu/news-releases/iq-appears-to-affect-ability-to-listen-in-noisy-settings
Your IQ May Affect How Well You Can Hear Speech, Study Shows : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-iq-may-affect-how-well-you-can-hear-speech-study-shows
Many people have experienced being distracted by the sound of other people talking when they are in a crowded place. A team led by researchers at the University of Washington conducted an experiment to examine the relationship between speech recognition ability in situations with multiple speakers and IQ.
The study involved 12 patients with autism, 10 patients with fetal alcohol syndrome , and 27 age- and sex-matched neurotypical controls. The researchers found that patients with autism and fetal alcohol syndrome often reported difficulty hearing voices in noisy environments, even when they had normal hearing, and showed a wider range of IQ scores than neurotypical individuals.
The participants first underwent a hearing screening to ensure they had clinically normal hearing. They then put on headphones and listened to a main speaker, who they were supposed to pay attention to, and two background speakers, one of which was a male, and the other was either a male and one female.
The speech consisted of a specific call sign, such as 'Ready, Eagle, go to green five now,' followed by a color and a number. Subjects were tasked with listening to a main speaker while background speakers were getting louder and louder, and then selecting the box with the corresponding color and number.
After completing the listening comprehension tasks, the participants were then given intelligence tests measuring verbal, non-verbal, and perceptual reasoning abilities. The researchers then analyzed the correlation between their listening ability and their IQ scores.
The results of the analysis confirmed that subjects with lower IQs tended to have greater difficulty with the multi-talker listening task, even if they had no hearing problems themselves. 'We found highly significant correlations between directly assessed intellectual ability and multi-talker speech perception. Intellectual ability was significantly correlated with speech perception thresholds in all three groups,' the researchers wrote in their paper.
Bonnie Lau, lead author of the paper and assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, explains that when it comes to listening to a specific voice in a noisy environment, 'you have to separate the speech stream. You have to identify the person of interest and selectively attend to them, suppressing competing noise features along the way. Then you have to understand the content from a linguistic perspective, encoding each phoneme and identifying syllables and words. You also have to understand semantic and social skills like smiling and nodding. All of these factors increase the cognitive load of communication in noisy environments.'
While the study was small, with fewer than 50 participants, and the results need to be verified in a larger population, Lau said, 'The relationship between cognitive ability and speech perception ability crossed diagnostic categories. This finding was consistent across all three groups.'
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