Age Differences in the Effects of Perceptual Noise

Wright, Linda L.; Elias, Jeffrey W.

doi:10.1093/geronj/34.5.704

Cited by 82 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…There is some support that older adults are more vulnerable to stimulus than to response interference. One study reported equivalent effects of response competition between younger and older adults, whereas older adults were more vulnerable to perceptual interference from task-relevant distractors (Wright & Elias, 1979). At small set sizes, older adults were particularly vulnerable to perceptual interference, but older and younger adults showed equivalent interference effects at larger set sizes (Maylor & Lavie, 1998).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executive function in Parkinson’s disease: contributions of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways to action and motivation

Ravizza

Goudreau

Delgado

et al. 2011

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Disruption of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways in Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with impairments in motivation, as well as in executive function. The goal of this study was to investigate whether these impairments are related and, if so, whether the disruption of frontostriatal pathways compromises the ability to process the motivational aspects of feedback in such tasks. In Experiment 1, informative feedback improved the performance of young, healthy participants in a task-switching paradigm. This task-switching paradigm was then used in Experiment 2 to test whether feedback would improve the performance of 17 PD patients and age-matched controls. The PD group benefitted from feedback to the same degree as control participants; however, depression scores on the Beck Depression Inventory were significantly related to feedback usage, especially when response selection demands were high. Regardless of feedback, PD patients were more impaired when response demands were high than in an equally difficult condition with low action demands. These results suggest that response selection is a core impairment of insufficient dopamine to the dorsal frontal striatal pathways.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Executive function in Parkinson’s disease: contributions of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways to action and motivation

Ravizza

Goudreau

Delgado

et al. 2011

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Age-related change in executive function (e.g., Baddeley, 1996), which is responsible for allocating attentional resources, also is a likely contributor to problems understanding one person while inhibiting messages from other talkers (Tun, et al, 2002). In fact, there is ample evidence that aging brings about a reduced ability to ignore irrelevant information (e.g., Hasher & Zachs, 1988;Kausler, 1982;Wright & Elias, 1979) and/ or difficulty discriminating relevant from irrelevant information (e.g., Plude & Hoyer, 1985).The focus of the research presented in this paper is to better understand the degree to which (and why) older adults experience problems understanding speech in situations with more than one talker. This work is motivated by the large body of anecdotal and empirical evidence demonstrating that older adults, particularly those with hearing loss, have problems understanding speech that is masked by either noise or by other speech.…”

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confidence: 99%

Aging and Speech-on-Speech Masking

2008

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Objectives-A common complaint of many older adults is difficulty communicating in situations where they must focus on one talker in the presence of other people speaking. In listening environments containing multiple talkers, age-related changes may be caused by increased sensitivity to energetic masking, increased susceptibility to informational masking (e.g., confusion between the target voice and masking voices), and/or cognitive deficits. The purpose of the present study was to tease out these contributions to the difficulties that older adults experience in speech-on-speech masking situations.Design-Groups of younger, normal-hearing individuals and older adults with varying degrees of hearing sensitivity (n = 12 per group) participated in a study of sentence recognition in the presence of four types of maskers: a two-talker masker consisting of voices of the same sex as the target voice, a two-talker masker of voices of the opposite sex as the target, a signal-envelope-modulated noise derived from the two-talker complex, and a speech-shaped steady noise. Subjects also completed a voice discrimination task to determine the extent to which they were able to incidentally learn to tell apart the target voice from the same-sex masking voices and to examine whether this ability influenced speech-on-speech masking.Results-Results showed that older adults had significantly poorer performance in the presence of all four types of maskers, with the largest absolute difference for the same-sex masking condition. When the data were analyzed in terms of relative group differences (i.e., adjusting for absolute performance) the greatest effect was found for the opposite-sex masker. Degree of hearing loss was significantly related to performance in several listening conditions. Some older subjects demonstrated a reduced ability to discriminate between the masking and target voices; performance on this task was not related to speech recognition ability.Conclusions-The overall pattern of results suggests that although amount of informational masking does not seem to differ between older and younger listeners, older adults (particularly those with hearing loss) evidence a deficit in the ability to selectively attend to a target voice, even when the masking voices are from talkers of the opposite sex. Possible explanations for these findings include problems understanding speech in the presence of a masker with temporal and spectral fluctuations and/or age-related changes in cognitive function.The primary auditory complaint of many older people is difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations. Numerous studies have documented this age-related decline in the ability to comprehend speech in the presence of a masker (e.g., Dubno, Dirks, & Shaefer, 1987;Plomp & Mimpen 1979). This research has demonstrated that older adults with presbycusis generally have greater difficulty understanding masked speech than do young, normal-hearing individuals. Although a portion of this problem is because of the filtering and distortio...

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“…The goal of the flankers was to produce perceptual interference. Using the Eriksen and Eriksen (34) filtering task, Wright and Elias (35) found that younger adults were more susceptible to the distractors than were the older adults.…”

Section: Evidence For Age Constancies In Selective Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual attention and aging

Karen¹

2000

Front Biosci

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The present review of visual attentional processes and aging focuses on definitions of attention that emphasize some aspect of the control of information processing (selective attention) or the processing resources needed to drive these control processes (attentional capacity). Emphasis is placed on how increased adult age affects attentional mechanisms and how these age differences in attention affect overall information processing. Past research has emphasized that selective attention appears to be resistant to age-related decline. Age-related deficits in attentional capacity or processing resources, however, have been found. A review of more recent psychological research demonstrates the extension of the investigation of attention with emphasis on further defining what is selected in selective attention, and on reexamining the processing resources or capacity issue. Finally, developments in cognitive neuroscience are reviewed in terms of their relevance to attention and aging.

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Age Differences in the Effects of Perceptual Noise

Cited by 82 publications

References 32 publications

Executive function in Parkinson’s disease: contributions of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways to action and motivation

Executive function in Parkinson’s disease: contributions of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways to action and motivation

Aging and Speech-on-Speech Masking

Visual attention and aging

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