Why Middle-Aged Listeners Have Trouble Hearing in Everyday Settings

Abstract

Summary Anecdotally, middle-aged listeners report difficulty conversing in social settings, even when they have normal audiometric thresholds [1–3]. Moreover, young adult listeners with “normal” hearing vary in their ability to selectively attend to speech amid similar streams of speech. Ignoring age, these individual differences correlate with physiological differences in temporal coding precision present in the auditory brainstem, suggesting that the fidelity of encoding of suprathreshold sound helps explain individual differences [4]. Here, we revisit the conundrum of whether early aging influences an individual’s ability to communicate in everyday settings. Although absolute selective attention ability is not predicted by age, reverberant energy interferes more with selective attention as age increases. Breaking the brainstem response down into components corresponding to coding of stimulus fine structure and envelope, we find that age alters which brainstem component predicts performance. Specifically, middle-aged listeners appear to rely heavily on temporal fine structure, which is more disrupted by reverberant energy than temporal envelope structure is. In contrast, the fidelity of envelope cues predicts performance in younger adults. These results hint that temporal envelope cues influence spatial hearing in reverberant settings more than is commonly appreciated and help explain why middle-aged listeners have particular difficulty communicating in daily life.

Cortical Correlates of the Auditory Frequency-Following and Onset Responses: EEG and fMRI Evidence

“…Features of the FFR vary between people, even within a neurologically normal young adult population (Hoormann et al, 1992;Ruggles et al, 2012;Coffey et al, 2016a). These differences have been linked to musical (Musacchia et al, 2007;Bidelman, 2013) and language (Wong et al, 2007) experience and have been shown to be cognitively and behaviorally relevant, for example, in the perception of speech in noise (Ruggles et al, 2012), consonance and dissonance (Bones et al, 2014), and in pitch perception bias (Coffey et al, 2016a).…”

“…These differences have been linked to musical (Musacchia et al, 2007;Bidelman, 2013) and language (Wong et al, 2007) experience and have been shown to be cognitively and behaviorally relevant, for example, in the perception of speech in noise (Ruggles et al, 2012), consonance and dissonance (Bones et al, 2014), and in pitch perception bias (Coffey et al, 2016a). Similarly, the MEG FFR-f 0 signal attributed to the right auditory cortex in our prior study was correlated with musical experience and fine frequency (FF) discrimination ability (Coffey et al, 2016b).…”

Age-Related Changes in Processing Simultaneous Amplitude Modulated Sounds Assessed Using Envelope Following Responses

“…Emerging evidence has shown that the loss of hearing thresholds due to changes in the periphery does not account for all the changes in hearing seen with age (Dubno et al 1984;Ruggles et al 2012;Fullgrabe et al 2015). Neural deficits due to loss of spiral ganglion and ribbon synapses (Sergeyenko et al 2013) or imbalances in the composition of neurotransmitters (Caspary et al 2008) in the central auditory pathway could account for the deficits seen in temporal processing and sound segregation at suprathreshold sound levels, which persist in subjects with clinically Bnormalĥ earing thresholds (Hind et al 2011).…”

“…Neural deficits due to loss of spiral ganglion and ribbon synapses (Sergeyenko et al 2013) or imbalances in the composition of neurotransmitters (Caspary et al 2008) in the central auditory pathway could account for the deficits seen in temporal processing and sound segregation at suprathreshold sound levels, which persist in subjects with clinically Bnormalĥ earing thresholds (Hind et al 2011). These neural deficits can be detected objectively in both human populations and animal models using auditory evoked potentials such as auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) a n d e n v e l o p e f o l l o w i n g r e s p o n s e s ( E F R s ) (Parthasarathy and Bartlett 2011;Ruggles et al 2012;Sergeyenko et al 2013;Shaheen et al 2015). EFRs represent summed, sustained, synchronized activities of populations of neurons from the auditory pathway which provide additional complementary information to metrics obtained from more established responses like ABRs (Parthasarathy et al 2014), with the major generators being the auditory brainstem and midbrain (Kuwada et al 2002;Chandrasekaran and Kraus 2010;Parthasarathy and Bartlett 2012).…”

Effects of sex and age on auditory spatial scene analysis

“…Recently, Ruggles et al (2012) showed that these interindividual differences correlated with physiological differences in temporal coding precision in the auditory brainstem. Since brainstem encoding of sound has been related to several factors involving experience (e.g., musical training and reading proficiency; for a recent review, see Hornickel and Kraus, 2012), it remains an open question whether individual experience could be more relevant to differences in auditory selective attention than sex and age, as were investigated here.…”