The effect of healthy aging on change detection and sensitivity to predictable sturcture in crowded acoustic scenes

Abstract

Acknowledgments: This project was supported by a PhD studentship from Action on Hearing Loss and a BBSRC project grant (BB/P003745/1) to MC. DV is supported by Medical Research Senior Fellowship (MR/S002537/1). We are grateful to Brian Moore and Stuart Rosen for advice and discussion. The auditory system plays a critical role in supporting our ability to detect abrupt changes in our surroundings. Here we study how this capacity is affected in the course of healthy ageing. Artifical acoustic 'scenes', populated by multiple concurrent streams of pure tones ('sources') were used to capture the challenges of listening in complex acoustic environments. Two scene conditions were included: REG scenes consisted of sources characterized by a regular temporal structure. Matched RAND scenes contained sources which were temporally random. Changes, manifested as the abrupt disappearance of one of the sources, were introduced to a subset of the trials and participants ('young' group N=41, age 20-38 years; 'older' group N=41, age 60-82 years) were instructed to monitor the scenes for these events. Previous work demonstrated that young listeners exhibit better change detection performance in REG scenes, reflecting sensitivity to temporal structure. Here we sought to determine: (1) Whether 'baseline' change detection ability (i.e. in RAND scenes) is affected by age. (2) Whether aging affects listeners' sensitivity to temporal regularity. (3) How change detection capacity relates to listeners' hearing and cognitive profile. The results demonstrated that healthy aging is associated with reduced sensitivity to abrupt scene changes in RAND scenes but that performance does not correlate with age or standard audiological measures such as pure tone audiometry or speech in noise performance. Remarkably older listeners' change detection performance improved substantially (up to the level exhibited by young listeners) in REG relative to RAND scenes. This suggests that the capacity to extract and track the regularity associated with scene sources, even in crowded acoustic environments, is relatively preserved in older listeners.

The effects of aging and hearing impairment on listening in noise

“…A recent study, however, suggested that elderly listeners can utilize predictability, albeit with a high degree of inter-individual variation(37). Further, de Kerangal and colleagues (41)also found that the ability to track sound sources based on acoustic regularities is largely preserved in old age. The current results strengthen this view, as figures within the tone clouds are detected by their temporally coherent behavior.…”