| 11. |
- Dahlström, Örjan, et al.
(författare)
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Cognitive training and effects on speech-in noise performance in normal hearing and hearing impaired individuals
- 2015
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Ingår i: CHSCOM2015. - : Linköping University Electronic Press. ; , s. 127-127
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Cognitive training might have potential to improve speech understanding under adverse listening conditions. Here, we have examined the effects of a 5-week computer-based cognitive training program on speech-in-noise-performance, in normal hearing (NH) participants and in participants with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (HI).Two groups, matched on gender and age (45-65 years), of 20 participants each (HI and NH respectively) are recruited. Participants perform four test-sessions; inclusion (t0), five weeks (t1), ten weeks (t2) and six months (t3). Training is performed either between t0 and t1, or between t1 and t2 (using a cross-over design), using the computer-based Cogmed training program, approximately 30-40 minutes per day, five days per week, during five weeks. At each session participants are tested in three different ways: (a) cognitive testing (KIPS, SICSPAN, TRT); (b) auditory performance (pure tone-audiometry (air- and bone-conduction) and speech audiometry (HINT, Swedish SPIN-test (SNR +4dB))); (c) cortical activation (MR sessions where participants performed a speech-in-noise task using Hagerman-sentences with steady-state speech-spectrum noise (SSN) and with two competing talkers). MR imaging is performed on a Philips Achieva 1.5 Tesla scanner using a sparse imaging technique in which stimuli are presented during the silent period between successive scans. Participants listen to auditory stimuli under eight different conditions: clear speech, SSN or two competing talkers (each at 90%, 50% and 0% intelligibility), and silent rest. Pre- and post-training, hearing disability is assessed by the Speech-Spatial-Qualities-Questionnaire.The study is on-going and behavioral results as well as results from fMRI will be presented.
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| 12. |
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| 13. |
- Edström, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Where service recovery meets its paradox : Implications for avoiding overcompensation
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of service theory and practice. - : Emerald. - 2055-6225 .- 2055-6233. ; 32:7, s. 1-13
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- PurposeThe service recovery paradox (SRP) is the phenomenon that happens when customer satisfaction level post-service failure and recovery surpasses the customer satisfaction level achieved at error-free service. The aim of this study was to identify how large the size of compensation has to be at recovery for customer satisfaction to surpass that of error-free service (i.e. to identify a threshold value for SRP). The purpose of this is to inform managers how to restore customer satisfaction yet avoid overcompensation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper covers two studies. Study 1 used the novel approach of asking participants who had experienced a service failure in the hotel industry what amount of money (recovery) would make them more satisfied than in the case of error-free service. Study 2 then tested the compensation levels expressed by Study 1 participants to be sufficient for the service recovery paradox to occur.FindingsStudy 1 indicated that the threshold for the SRP was (on average) around 1,204 SEK, or just over 80% of the original room reservation price of 1,500 SEK (approx. $180). Study 2 found that (on average) the customer satisfaction of participants who received 1,204 SEK in compensation for service failure marked the point where it surpassed that of error-free service. Participants who received 633 SEK were less satisfied; participants who received 1,774 SEK were more satisfied.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are context-specific. Future research should test the findings' generalizability.Practical implicationsThe approach used in this paper could provide managers with a tool to guide their service recovery efforts. The findings could help hotel managers to make strategic decisions to restore customer satisfaction yet avoid overcompensation, given a legitimate service failure in which the organization is at fault.Originality/valueNumerous previous studies have investigated the occurrence or absence of the SRP at predetermined compensation levels. This paper used a novel approach to find a quantitative threshold at which the magnitude of the recovery effort makes customer satisfaction surpass that of error-free service
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| 14. |
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| 15. |
- Haga, Andreas
(författare)
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Psychological consequences of moral labelling in the built environment
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Climate change is strongly linked to human behavior and technologies, and many of the barriers to sustainable behavior are rather psychological than technological. More sustainable technologies and food products have been introduced to combat climate change, most often labeled with morally loaded labels such as “organic” or “environmentally friendly”. The purpose of this thesis was, first, to gain knowledge into the psychological consequences of the introduction of eco-friendly technologies in the built environment, specifically how labeling these products “eco-friendly” influences perception and performance; secondly, to identify underlying psychological mechanisms and limits of this eco-label effect. Study 1 showed that participants generally prefer the taste of consumables labeled eco-friendly compared to conventional labeled alternatives, but the study also found that the label-effect is limited to certain products and certain judgmental dimensions. Results in this study also showed that people believe that eco-labeled products have positive effects on mental abilities. In Study 2 and 3, the focus was to study the effects of eco-labeling in the built environment on performance in cognitively demanding tasks, such as color discrimination and proofreading. At this point, the eco-label effect had been shown across a wide range of products like food, water, and office technologies, and been generalized to a wide range of judgmental dimensions and behaviors (i.e. taste, nutrition health benefits, comfortableness, and mental performance). In Study 4, results showed that eco-labeling can have effects also on behavior that arguably have very little to do with the labeling itself, by showing that social perception of photographed persons can also depend on the labeling of desktop lamps. A consistent finding across the studies was also that individual differences in environmental concern modulated the magnitude of the effect. The magnitude was larger in people with higher concern for the environment.
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| 16. |
- Haga, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Psychological restoration can depend on stimulus-source attribution : a challenge for the evolutionary account?
- 2016
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Visiting or viewing nature environments can have restorative psychological effects, while exposure to the built environment typically has less positive effects. A classic view is that this difference in restorative potential of nature and built environments depends on differences in the intrinsic characteristics of the stimuli. In addition, an evolutionary account is often assumed whereby restoration is believed to be a hardwired response to nature’s stimulus-features. Here, we propose the novel hypothesis that the restorative effects of a stimulus do not entirely depend on the stimulus-features per se, but also on the meaning that people assign to the stimulus. Participants conducted cognitively demanding tests prior to and after a brief pause. During the pause, the participants were exposed to an ambiguous sound consisting of pink noise with white noise interspersed. Participants in the “nature sound-source condition” were told that the sound originated from a nature scene with a waterfall; participants in the “industrial sound-source condition” were told that the sound originated from an industrial environment with machinery; and participants in the “control condition” were told nothing about the sound origin. Self-reported mental exhaustion showed that participants in the nature sound-source condition were more psychologically restored after the pause than participants in the industrial sound-source condition. One potential interpretation of the results is that restoration from nature experiences depends on learned, positive associations with nature; not only on hardwired responses shaped by evolution.
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| 17. |
- Halin, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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A shield against distraction
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. - : Elsevier. - 2211-3681 .- 2211-369X. ; 3:1, s. 31-36
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, we apply the basic idea of a trade-off between the level of concentration and distractibility to test whether a manipulation of task difficulty can shield against distraction. Participants read, either in quiet or with a speech noise background, texts that were displayed either in an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read font. Background speech impaired prose recall, but only when the text was displayed in the easy-to-read font. Most importantly, recall was better in the background speech condition for hard-to-read than for easy-to-read texts. Moreover, individual differences in working memory capacity were related to the magnitude of disruption, but only in the easy-to-read condition. Making a task more difficult can sometimes facilitate selective attention in noisy work environments by promoting focal-task engagement.
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| 18. |
- Halin, Niklas
(författare)
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A Shield against Distraction from Environmental Noise
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Working in noisy environments can be detrimental to cognitive performance. In order to perform well people have to find a way to attenuate distraction. This thesis aimed to study the balance between distractibility and task demands in the context of office-related tasks as a means by which to better understand how people in the work environment are influenced by environmental noise.In Report 1, 2 and 3 higher focal-task difficulty was achieved by manipulating the readability of the text that participants were asked to read (i.e. either displaying the text in hard-to-read font or by masking it with static visual noise). The results of Report 1 and Report 2 showed that background speech impaired performance on proofreading and memory for written stories respectively compared to silence, but only when the focaltask difficulty was low, not when it was high.In Report 3 it was shown that background speech, road traffic noise, and aircraft noise impaired performance on text memory compared to silence, but again, only when focal-task difficulty was low.In Report 4 it was tested whether higher cognitive load on the focal task would reduce peripheral processing of a to-be-ignored background story. The results of Report 4 showed that participants in the low-load condition recalled more of the information conveyed in the to-be-ignored background story compared to participants in the high-load condition. It was also investigated whether individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) would influence participants’ memory for written stories (Report 2) and incidental memory of the to-background story (Report 4) differently depending on task demand.The results showed that individuals scoring high on the WMC-test were less distracted by background speech in the easy-to-read font condition (Report 2), and recalled less of the information in the to-be-ignored background story in the low-cognitive load condition (Report 4) compared to individuals that scored lower on the WMC-test. These relationships were not found in the hard-to-read font condition in Report 2, or in the high-cognitive load condition in Report 4. Taken together, these results indicate that higher focal-task difficulty can shield against the detrimental effect environmental noise on performance on office-related tasks. Moreover, it shows that higher focal-task difficulty can help individuals with low-WMC to reach a level of performance that is similar to that of high-capacity individuals.
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| 19. |
- Halin, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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Central load reduces peripheral processing : evidence from incidental memory of background speech
- 2015
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology. - : Wiley. - 0036-5564 .- 1467-9450. ; 56:6, s. 607-612
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Is there a trade-off between central (working memory) load and peripheral (perceptual) processing? To address this question, participants were requested to undertake an n-back task in one of two levels of central/cognitive load (i.e., 1-back or 2-back) in the presence of a to-be-ignored story presented via headphones. Participants were told to ignore the background story, but they were given a surprise memory test of what had been said in the background story, immediately after the n-back task was completed. Memory was poorer in the high central load (2-back) condition in comparison with the low central load (1-back) condition. Hence, when people compensate for higher central load, by increasing attentional engagement, peripheral processing is constrained. Moreover, participants with high working memory capacity (WMC)—with a superior ability for attentional engagement—remembered less of the background story, but only in the low central load condition. Taken together, peripheral processing—as indexed by incidental memory of background speech—is constrained when task engagement is high.
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| 20. |
- Halin, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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Effects of Speech on Proofreading: Can Task-Engagement Manipulations Shield Against Distraction?
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of experimental psychology. Applied. - : American Psychological Association. - 1076-898X .- 1939-2192. ; 20:1, s. 69-80
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article reports 2 experiments that examine techniques to shield against the potentially disruptive effects of task-irrelevant background speech on proofreading. The participants searched for errors in texts that were either normal (i.e., written in Times New Roman font) or altered (i.e., presented either in Haettenschweiler font or in Times New Roman but masked by visual noise) in 2 sound conditions: a silent condition and a condition with background speech. Proofreading for semantic/contextual errors was impaired by speech, but only when the text was normal. This effect of speech was completely abolished when the text was written in an altered font (Experiment 1) or when it was masked by visual noise (Experiment 2). There was no functional difference between the 2 ways to alter the text with regard to the way the manipulations influenced the effects of background speech on proofreading. The results indicate that increased task demands, which lead to greater focal-task engagement, may shield against the distracting effects of background speech on proofreading.
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