A new study has revealed that our IQ can affect how well we can hear another person speaking.
Previous studies have already identified that neurodiverse people may have more difficulty hearing what is being said in a noisy room.
Now, this thesis has been corroborated, in a study in PLOS One.
Researchers at the University of Washington recruited 12 participants with autism and 10 with fetal alcohol syndrome, as both conditions are associated with difficulty hearing in noisy environments and include people with a variety of IQ levels.
The control group included 27 neurotypical people, corresponding in age and sex to the other participants.
After testing volunteers’ ability to distinguish the details of a conversation produced by a computer program — with several other voices speaking at the same time, a phenomenon known as the “cocktail party problem” — the researchers found that those with lower IQ tended to find the task more difficult.
“This finding was consistent across all three groups,” the auditory neuroscientist told . Bonnie Laufrom the University of Washington, who led the investigation.
After all, it’s not “wax”
All participants were classified as having normal hearing. This suggests that difficulty hearing in noisy environments may have more to do with certain forms of cognitive function than anything connected to our ears.
When one thinks about it, it makes sense that being able to understand what someone is saying amidst other background conversations implies being able to separate sound streams, determine which are important and isolate speech.
Furthermore, to maintain a conversation, it is necessary pay attention to and understand the various auditory and visual cues that arise.
“All of these factors increase the cognitive load of communication when there is noise”, says Lau.
As Science Alert states, the main conclusion of this study is that it is necessary to go beyond the idea that hearing problems always have the same underlying causes.
