Do hearing-impaired listeners benefit from spatial and temporal cues in a complex auditory scene?

In auditory scenes containing many similar sound sources, difficulties with the detection and organization of acoustic information can lead to disruptions in the identification of behaviorally relevant targets. A previous study conducted in young normal-hearing listeners (Best et al., 2007) investigated the benefit of providing simple visual cues for when and/or where a target string of spoken digits would occur in a complex acoustic mixture. Importantly, the visual cues provided no information about the target content. A visual cue indicating which loudspeaker (from an array of five) would contain the target improved accuracy, and a cue indicating which time segment (out of a possible five) would contain the target resulted in a smaller improvement. The present study extended this work to young listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. These listeners performed more poorly overall than the normal-hearing group, but did benefit from visual cues indicating where and when to listen for the target. While the magnitude of the temporal cue benefit was comparable between groups, the spatial cue benefit was smaller on average for the hearing impairedlisteners. This result suggests that one component of the difficulties experienced by listeners with hearing loss in complex tasks of this nature is related to directing spatial attention.