Ian W --
The name given is low levels of discrimination. The ability to make out a particular sound or voice in amongst other sounds, or even just the ability to understand speech. In the extreme people can hear a voice but not actually discriminate the sounds into meaningful words. This is common in the deaf/hard of hearing and audiologists will carry out speech discrimination tests. This is usually done by playing voices of different people at different sound levels with or without background noise. They may talk in snippets or single words so there is no contextual clue to what the word is, or give a sentence that provides some contextual clues to what is being said. The count the bleeps type hearing test is just for that hearing it does not identify people who cannot hear voices or sounds well against background noise. I am surprised that this is not tested for. The person suffering a loss of speech or sound discrimination may not be aware of it, but will find talking/listening in noisy surroundings difficult and tiring.
This is totally different to the 'attentional' or 'cognitive' tunneling effect, where under pressure humans will focus on one particular part of their environment and exclude all others. If that is the wrong thing then that will lead to problems in a cockpit environment. Sounds are one of the first stimuli to be filtered out, the last to be filtered out are haptics (touch and feeling) hence the reason for stick shakers.
Great post Ian W. It would not suprise me, based on the status by today, if these aspects will return in discussions following the investigation, and will even find their way into the final report.
When you go from relaxed to stressful situations, and end up at the most extreme stress levels on human beings - then you go through something that I call "roll back" (using my own words - I am sorry, but I do not know if there is a scientific label for the whole 'movement'). Which means that the brain's main processing moves from the frontal lobe, to the 'centre of the brain', and finally down to the 'brain stem'. One of the effects is for instance that you cannot lift as much weight in an extremely stressful environment as in a relaxed one. The reduction can be up to 50%. I do not know any numbers for the degradation of pull strength ( ref old fashioned sticks).