Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2026

Identifier

DOI: 10.1186/s12982-026-01897-z; PMCID: PMC13092542

Abstract

Individuals who work in loud environments often choose not to wear hearing protection devices (HPDs) while on the job. A prevailing justification for this decision involves potential performance impairments that come with HPD use. While previous research has been successful in characterizing the overwhelming prevalence of this issue, the question of how to go about improving HPD use still remains. In this study, we investigated the possibility that performance while wearing an HPD could improve if people are given listening training with a simulated HPD. Participants listened to podcasts in which the audio was filtered to simulate wearing an HPD (trained condition) or left unfiltered (untrained condition). To quantify the impacts of this exposure on speech comprehension and multitasking performance, we employed a recently developed task that involves tracking on-screen moving objects with a computer mouse. In this task, listeners gain hypothetical dollars by closely tracking a target object that is continually updated via speech commands presented under simulated HPD or no HPD conditions. Results suggest that listening training can have positive impacts on performance. The trained condition outperformed the untrained condition in target object tracking while listening with and without a simulated HPD. Though this is a small study, with an artificial work task, our data suggest that the development and evaluation of listening training is worthy of further examination. The incorporation of listening training into hearing loss prevention programs in the workplace could serve to improve HPD use rates by addressing workers' core performance complaints.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12982-026-01897-z.

Journal Title

Discov Public Health

Volume

23

Issue

1

First Page

561

Last Page

561

PubMed ID

42017011

Keywords

Hearing loss; Noise; Occupational Health; Perceptual learning; Worker Training

Comments

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Publisher's Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12982-026-01897-z

Download

Share

COinS