Age-related changes in detecting a mistuned harmonic

Alain, Claude; McDonald, Kelly L.; Ostroff, Jodi M.; Schneider, Bruce A.

doi:10.1121/1.1367243

Cited by 83 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…They reported that the amplitude of component Pa of the MLAER increased with mistuning. Significant changes in Pa amplitude occurred at latencies as short as 32 msec, extending the authors' previous studies in which mistuning had produced changes in evoked and eventrelated potentials with longer latencies (Alain et al, 2001(Alain et al, , 2002. Perceptual segregation of the mistuned component was measured in a separate series of trials, from a subset of the listeners who provided the evoked-potential data.…”

Section: Evoked Potentials In Response To Mistuned Tonessupporting

confidence: 70%

Spectral Processing and Sound Source Determination

Sinex

2005

International Review of Neurobiology

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Humans normally listen in mixed environments, in which sounds originating from more than one source overlap in time and in frequency. The auditory system is able to extract information specific to the individual sources that contribute to the composite signal and process the information for each source separately; this is called "auditory scene analysis" or "sound-source determination." Sounds that are simultaneously present but generated independently tend to differ along relatively simple acoustic dimensions. These dimensions may be temporal, as when sounds begin or end asynchronously, or spectral, as when the sounds have different fundamental frequencies. Psychophysical experiments have identified some of the ways in which human listeners use these dimensions to isolate sources of sound. A simple but useful stimulus, a harmonic complex tone with or without a mistuned component, can be used for parametric investigation of the processing of spectral structure. This "mistuned tone" stimulus has been used in several psychophysical experiments, and more recently in studies that specifically address the neural mechanisms that underlie segregation based on harmonicity. Studies of the responses of single neurons in the chinchilla auditory system to mistuned tones are reviewed here in detail. The results of those experiments support the view that neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) exhibit responses to mistuned tones that are larger and temporally more complex than the same neurons' responses to harmonic tones. Mistuning does not produce comparable changes in the discharge patterns of auditory nerve (AN) fibers, indicating that a major transformation in the neural representation of harmonic structure occurs in the auditory brainstem. The brainstem processing that accomplishes this transformation may contribute to the segregation of competing sounds and ultimately to the identification of sound sources.

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Section: Evoked Potentials In Response To Mistuned Tonessupporting

confidence: 70%

Spectral Processing and Sound Source Determination

Sinex

2005

International Review of Neurobiology

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“…This amount of mistuning is considerably large and was chosen because it usually leads to a "pop-out" effect, in much the same way that a visual target defined by a unique color pops out of a display filled with homogeneous distractors defined by a secondary color (Treisman and Gelade, 1980). This amount of mistuning is also well above older adults' thresholds for detecting mistuning, which averaged ϳ5-6% for 100 ms sounds (Alain et al, 2001a). More importantly, the effect of age on concurrent sound perception remains even after controlling for differences in hearing sensitivity between young and older adults.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…This small discrepancy between our findings and those of Hiraumi et al (2005) may be related to several factors, including differences in sound duration, number of trials presented to participants, and the utilization of fixed versus random sound presentation. For example, previous behavioral research has shown that detecting harmonicity decreased with increasing sound duration (Moore et al, 1985;Alain et al, 2001a). Hence, it is possible that the longer stimulus durations used by Hiraumi et al (2005) have generated earlier ORN latencies, which would have overlapped the N1 wave and caused an enhanced N1 amplitude and shift in latency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The impact of background noise on speech perception is greater in older than young adults (Prosser et al, 1990;Tun and Wingfield, 1999;Schneider et al, 2000) and may be related to older adults' difficulties in partitioning the incoming acoustic wave into distinct representations (i.e., auditory scene analysis). This proposal has received support from studies showing higher thresholds in older than young adults for detecting a mistuned harmonic (Alain et al, 2001a;Grube et al, 2003), which remains even after controlling for age differences in hearing sensitivity (Alain et al, 2001a), suggesting impairment in central auditory functioning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

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Age-Related Differences in Neuromagnetic Brain Activity Underlying Concurrent Sound Perception

Alain¹,

McDonald²

2007

J. Neurosci.

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Deficits in parsing concurrent auditory events are believed to contribute to older adults' difficulties in understanding speech in adverse listening conditions (e.g., cocktail party). To explore the level at which aging impairs sound segregation, we measured auditory evoked fields (AEFs) using magnetoencephalography while young, middle-aged, and older adults were presented with complex sounds that either had all of their harmonics in tune or had the third harmonic mistuned by 4 or 16% of its original value. During the recording, participants were asked to ignore the stimuli and watch a muted subtitled movie of their choice. For each participant, the AEFs were modeled with a pair of dipoles in the superior temporal plane, and the effects of age and mistuning were examined on the amplitude and latency of the resulting source waveforms. Mistuned stimuli generated an early positivity (60 -100 ms), an object-related negativity (ORN) (140 -180 ms) that overlapped the N1 and P2 waves, and a positive displacement that peaked at ϳ230 ms (P230) after sound onset. The early mistuning-related enhancement was similar in all three age groups, whereas the subsequent modulations (ORN and P230) were reduced in older adults. These age differences in auditory cortical activity were associated with a reduced likelihood of hearing two sounds as a function of mistuning. The results reveal that inharmonicity is rapidly and automatically registered in all three age groups but that the perception of concurrent sounds declines with age.

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“…However, the processing of those primitive grouping cues represents processing by additional peripheral, central, and cognitive mechanisms, as suggested by the involvement of a multi-stage processing model Alain et al, 2005;Alain, 2005, 2007). Especially, Alain et al (2001) showed that age-related deficits in detecting a mistuned harmonic depended not only on the listeners' peripheral factors but also upon an age-related decline in central auditory functioning. As noted, however, on a group basis there were no significant differences in call-sign detection among the four groups.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of fundamental-frequency and sentence-onset differences on speech-identification performance of young and older adults in a competing-talker background

Lee

Humes

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study investigated the benefits of differences between sentences in fundamental frequency (F0) and temporal onset for sentence pairs among listener groups differing in age and hearing sensitivity. Two experiments were completed with the primary difference between experiments being the way in which the stimuli were presented. Experiment 1 used blocked stimulus presentation, which ultimately provided redundant acoustic cues to mark the target sentence in each pair, whereas Experiment 2 sampled a slightly more restricted stimulus space, but in a completely randomized presentation order. For both experiments, listeners were required to detect a cue word ("Baron") for the target sentence in each pair and to then identify the target words (color, number) that appeared later in the target sentence. Results of Experiment 1 showed that F0 or onset separation cues were beneficial to both cue-word detection and color-number identification performance. There were no significant differences across groups in the ability to detect the cue word, but groups differed in their ability to identify the correct color-number words. Elderly adults with impaired hearing had the greatest difficulty with the identification task despite the application of spectral shaping to restore the audibility of the speech stimuli. For the most part, the primary results of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, although, in the latter experiment, all older adults, whether they had normal or impaired hearing, performed worse than young adults with normal hearing. From Experiment 2, the benefits received for a difference in F0 between talkers of 6 semitones were equivalent to those received for an onset asynchrony of 300 ms between sentences and, for such conditions, the combination of both sound-segregation cues resulted in an additive benefit.

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Age-related changes in detecting a mistuned harmonic

Cited by 83 publications

References 30 publications

Spectral Processing and Sound Source Determination

Spectral Processing and Sound Source Determination

Age-Related Differences in Neuromagnetic Brain Activity Underlying Concurrent Sound Perception

Effect of fundamental-frequency and sentence-onset differences on speech-identification performance of young and older adults in a competing-talker background

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