Reducing the Cognitive Cost of Listening: Behavioral Evidence for the Efficacy of Consumer Hearables in Noise

Background: Listening in noisy environments requires significant cognitive resources, often de-fined as “listening effort.” While conventional hearing aids can reduce this effort, uptake remains lowdue to cost and stigma. Emerging consumer “hearables,” such as the Apple AirPods Pro 2, offer acces-sibility features like “Conversation Boost,” but objective evidence regarding their impact on cognitiveload is scarce.Methods: We employed a dual-task paradigm with 29 adults (14 younger, 15 older) to objectivelymeasure listening effort. Participants performed a primary speech-in-noise task (QuickSIN) concur-rently with a secondary visual pattern-recall task, under Aided (AirPods Pro 2) and Unaided conditions. Asecondary aim was to validate the device’s in-situ audiometry feature against clinical standards (𝑁 = 60ears).Results: The device did not significantly improve primary speech recognition accuracy (𝑝 > .05),suggesting that at the calibrated Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), the acoustic benefit was primarily cog-nitive rather than perceptual. Performance on the secondary visual task improved significantly in theAided condition (𝑀 = 77.7%) compared to the Unaided condition (𝑀 = 72.8%; 𝑝=.016, Cohen’s𝑑= 0.48). This dissociation suggests a release of cognitive resources. Additionally, the device’s self-administered hearing test showed high validity (MAE = 2.80 dB; 𝑟 = 0.94) compared to clinical audiom-etry.Conclusion: Consumer hearables can significantly reduce the cognitive cost of listening, freeingup resources for concurrent tasks even when speech intelligibility scores remain unchanged. Thesefindings support the utility of such devices as accessible tools for managing listening fatigue.