Conversational Interaction Is the Brain in Action: Implications for the Evaluation of Hearing and Hearing...

Humans have evolved the unique capacity to efficiently communicate using the spoken word. Hearing plays a key role as a receiver in this process and dysfunction leads to difficulties in listening and communication. It is widely accepted that effective communication is not adequately captured with current behavioral speech tests that principally focus on passive sound detection and speech recognition with idealized stimuli. To address the question of what it will take to obtain more ecologically valid outcomes from behavioral speech tests, recent approaches, and test paradigms devised to address some of the acknowledged shortcomings of current speech tests were reviewed. Additionally, some recent work which has focused on understanding brain function in social and dynamic interaction scenarios, so-called second person neuroscience, was reviewed. These reviews revealed that, while recent efforts in bridging the gap between behavioral speech tests and everyday communication situations represent important steps in the right direction, they are unlikely to provide a complete account of everyday communication situations. Further, brain imaging studies, together with our growing understanding of "mirror" neurons and the development of theories around embodied cognition, have demonstrated that the brain networks recruited during emotionally engaged interaction between interlocutors are far more complex when compared to that of a passive listener. Speech and nonspeech (e.g., gaze direction, body posture, etc.) interactions between the interlocutors give rise to the perception of effective interaction (sense of "agency") and activate neural networks important in decision-making and subsequent communication interaction. Successful conversational interaction represents the negotiation of a dynamic context and the emergence of a state of shared understanding between participants. In conclusion, to achieve highly ecologically valid outcomes related to communication, future testing will most likely require an interactive or conversational paradigm to elicit the brain states that are present in everyday social interactions.