Abstract
<p>Autistic people experience disproportionate challenges in noisy environments than non-autistic people. To capture a naturalistic representation of listening effort in adverse condition, an autistic (n=27) and non-autistic group (n=22) were presented with an audiobook and different speech masking noises while their pupils were measured with an eye tracker. The audiobook task consisted of a target-only condition and three noise conditions: 1-speaker, 2-speaker, and speech-shaped noise. The task was entirely passive with no behavioral or subjective measures. We measured the mean and variance of the evoked pupillary response—a reliable measure of cognitive effort. Primary findings revealed effects of the speech-masking conditions and condition occurrence on temporal dynamics of pupillary behavior. Specifically, the autistic group exhibited a general increase of mean pupil dilation over time, whereas the non-autistic group showed no difference in pupil size over time. Both groups showed increased variance in pupil size over time in all conditions throughout the task. These findings demonstrate that an audiobook-in-noise task can provide insight into temporal dynamics of pupil behavior during naturalistic speech perception in noise (SPiN). These results also suggest increased listening effort required in the autistic sample compared to the non-autistic controls.</p>