Auditory experience modulates fronto-parietal theta activity serving fluid intelligence

Abstract

Children who are hard-of-hearing are at risk for developmental language and academic delays compared to children with normal hearing. Some work suggests that high-order cognitive function, including fluid intelligence, may relate to language and academic outcomes in children with hearing loss, but findings in these studies have been mixed and to date there have been no studies of the whole-brain neural dynamics serving fluid intelligence in the context of hearing loss. To this end, this study sought to identify the impact of hearing loss and subsequent hearing aid use on the neural dynamics serving abstract reasoning in children who are hard-of-hearing relative to children with normal hearing using magnetoencephalography. We found significant elevations in occipital and parietal theta activity during early stimulus evaluation in children who are hard of hearing relative to normal-hearing peers. In addition, we found that greater hearing aid use was significantly related to reduced activity throughout the frontoparietal network. Notably, there were no differences in alpha dynamics between groups during later-stage processing, nor did alpha activity correlate with hearing aid use. These cross-sectional data suggest that differences in auditory experience lead to widespread alterations in the neural dynamics serving initial stimulus processing in fluid intelligence in children.

Alpha and theta oscillations on a visual strategic processing task in age-related hearing loss

“…In general, our findings show that ARHL influences theta oscillations at earlier time points on a visual cognitive control task. Our findings align with other studies, both human ( Heinrichs-Graham et al, 2022 ; Ryan et al, 2023 ) and animal ( Johne et al, 2022 ), which have shown that hearing loss modulates oscillatory activity in the theta band. However, adequate comparison of our findings with others is difficult since we used a visual task while most have examined theta activity in relation to auditory tasks, primarily SiN recognition ( Doelling et al, 2014 ; Hyafil et al, 2015 ; Etard and Reichenbach, 2019 ).…”

Stress and Psychosocial Distress Scale with Blunted Oscillatory Dynamics Serving Abstract Reasoning

“…Prior work has identified the key neural oscillations involved in Gf, which include theta, alpha, and gamma oscillations in frontoparietal regions [25][26][27][28][29][30], with some studies showing that the strength of oscillations in these regions scales with greater cognitive demands and effort [31,32]. Further, oscillatory responses in the PFC and parietal cortices have been shown to support more optimal performance in tasks involving Gf [27,28], thus underscoring the critical role oscillations play in the long-range communication and integration of the distributed networks serving these higher-order cognitive processes [32][33][34].…”

Neuromodulatory effects of parietal high‐definition transcranial direct‐current stimulation on network‐level activity serving fluid intelligence

“…Briefly, we applied HD-tDCS and then collected high-density magnetoencephalography (MEG) during performance of an established abstract reasoning task. This abstract reasoning task was adapted from Raven's Progressive Matrices and has been shown to be tightly linked to classic measures of Gf (Raven & Raven, 2003;Heinrichs-Graham et al, 2022;Taylor et al, 2020Taylor et al, , 2022. Previous studies that stimulated the parietal cortices have shown improved abstract reasoning performance following stimulation compared to the sham condition, although these studies used theta frequency tACS and relatively small samples (Neubauer et al, 2017;Pahor & Jaušovec, 2014).…”