Aging, Hearing Acuity, and the Attentional Costs of Effortful. Findings support the hypothesis that extra effort. a so-called “effortfulness hypothesis. suggests that informational masking can occur at a semantic level if intelligibility is sufficient. Based on the Effortfulness Hypothesis. The effortfulness hypothesis implies that difficulty in decoding the surface form, as in the case of age-related sensory limitations or background noise, consumes the. Supporting the Effortfulness Hypothesis. Resource Allocated to Word-level and Textbase-level. Patterns of resource allocation are reliable among younger and Aging is associated with sensory declines that may make encoding of the surface form of language especially difficult. The Effortfulness Hypothesis (Wingfield et al. Visual noise disrupts conceptual integration. According to the Effortfulness Hypothesis. The current study was designed to directly test this hypothesis. Official Full-Text Publication: Visual noise disrupts conceptual integration in reading on ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists. In psychology, effortfulness is the subjective experience of exertion when performing an activity, especially the mental concentration and energy required. Xuefei Gao, University of Illinois at Urbana. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The effortfulness hypothesis implies that difficulty in. Official Full-Text Publication: Reading and Resource Allocation with Visual Noise on ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists.