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Kate Slade

School of Biological and Environmental Sciences

Faculty of Science

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The Effort Lab

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The Effort Lab Website

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I am currently researching the psychophysiological correlates of listening effort for my funded PhD at Liverpool John Moores Univerisity supervised by Dr Michael Richter, Professor Stephen Fairclough and Professor Sophia Kramer (VU University Amsterdam).

Mental fatigue is a predominant issue that individuals with hearing impairment report suffering with, evidence suggests that this fatigue is a result of excessive effort investment in daily listening. My research focuses on using psychological theories of effort and physiology to examine whether measures of autonomic effort-driven cardiac responses (systolic blood pressure, pre-ejection period and respiratory sinus arrhythmia) are useful indicators of effort investment in listening tasks and subsequent mental fatigue. The ability to quantify listening effort in such a way may help audiologists to enhance the quality of audiometric assessments and hearing aid fitting, to reduce mental effort involved in listening.

Thus far, we have conducted studies guided by the framework of motivational intensity theory, which test the impact of both listening demand and the importance of understanding speech on effort-driven cardiac responses in individuals with no hearing impairment. We aim to investigate whether changes in autonomic activity during listening effort can predict self-reported mental fatigue.
We are also interested in how autonomic activation during mentally effortful tasks, such as listening, differs from activation during physical effort investment.

You can find out more information about my research at our lab website, www.effortlab.website.

Degrees

2019, Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom, PhD
2015, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, United Kingdom, BSc, Applied Psychology

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