Internship report: Educational tests and undiagnosed hearing loss

During my six weeks as a LuCiD intern at the PELiCAN Lab under the supervision of Dr Hannah Stewart, I gained invaluable insights into the steps of setting up a study, from a hypothesis to a fully developed experiment. I conducted a literature review, learnt new technologies, and designed the research visits for a multi-national study investigating the impact of undiagnosed hearing loss on assessing children’s language and cognition.  

The study is inspired by research conducted by Christian Füllgrabe which found that artificially simulating hearing loss in neurotypical adults generated false positives on dementia tests. Christian’s study unveiled the wide-reaching hidden impacts that undiagnosed hearing loss may have on verbally administered diagnostic tests. Thus, this project aims to assess if the same effect is found in children’s educational tests. 

Firstly, my primary responsibility was to conduct a fully comprehensive literature review assessing which educational tests are predominately used to test a wide variety of language and cognitive abilities. Through my investigation of these tests, we narrowed the list to educational tests that were standardized on populations in both English, French and German. This is because the study is to be conducted not only at the PELiCAN Lab at Lancaster University, but also at Potsdam University with Prof Outi Tuomainen and Université Libre de Bruxelles with Dr Axelle Calcus. This is to see if the effect occurs across languages (English, German and French). After presenting my literature review to the researchers a unanimous decision to use both Clinical evaluation of language fundamentals (CELF-5) and Wechsler Intelligence scale for children(WISC-V) (to assess language, quantitative and non-verbal reasoning) on children aged 8-10 was made.   

The second obstacle of project design was how we would artificially simulate the children’s hearing loss. I was tasked with familiarizing myself with the installation and use of a 3D binaural audio app developed by Cuevas-Rodriguez et al (2019) which was capable of simulating both different severities and shapes of hearing loss. A local music festival was using this app combined with VR headsets to simulate hearing loss in a lecture theatre. I got to experience the simulation with the VR headsets myself and even assist the team in the running of the app on the VR software. It was an incredibly surreal experience to be sat with some of my lecturers using this technology and being asked to provide my feedback on the simulations in their first stages of development.  

My assistance with other projects running in the PELiCAN lab during my internship meant I was able to gain firsthand experience running data collection with the age group of children we were aiming to recruit for the new study. This experience enabled me to identify and discuss a multitude of practical considerations that must be made when testing children of this age group such as the length of the research visit. This really engaged me with the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that designing a research would visit entail.  

I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to Dr Hannah Stewart for being a continual source of support, guidance and reassurance throughout the whole internship and to LuCiD for granting me this opportunity. This opportunity has provided me with a fantastic insight into working in a neuroscience lab and has only increased my resolve to continue to strive towards a career as researcher in the future.  

References:  

• Füllgrabe, Christian. (2020). When hearing loss masquerades as cognitive decline. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry. 91. jnnp-2020. 10.1136/jnnp-2020-324707.
• Cuevas-Rodríguez M, Picinali L, González-Toledo D, Garre C, de la Rubia-Cuestas E, Molina-Tanco L and Reyes-Lecuona A. (2019) 3D Tune-In Toolkit: An open-source library for real-time binaural spatialisation. PLOS ONE 14(3): e0211899. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211899