Walking While Listening and Remembering: Dual- and Multi-Task Costs

In day-to-day life people often need to perform more than one task at a time. Dual- and multi-task costs may occur in these situations. In the present study we examined the realistic situation in which people must communicate in an acoustically-challenging environment while walking. Participants (younger adults and middle-aged adults) performed a task of listening and responding to speech presented in competing speech. In this task, participants repeated back sentences presented from a front loudspeaker in the presence of two-talker same-sex speech maskers presented from loudspeakers to the right and left. In some conditions they were asked to also complete a memory task in which they were shown a sequence of four numbers and letters (e.g., “C9L3”) before the trial began and had to report that sequence at the end of the trial. These tasks were completed while either standing still or while walking on a treadmill. Gait parameters were measured using sensors attached to participants' wrists, legs, waist, chest, and forehead. This presentation will detail results of preliminary analyses designed to examine costs involved in performing these tasks simultaneously compared to individually in the two age groups. [Work supported by NIDCD 012057.].