A Bruner-Potter effect in audition? Spoken word recognition in adult aging.

Abstract

Bruner and Potter (1964) demonstrated the surprising finding that incrementally increasing the clarity of images until they were correctly recognized (ascending presentation) was less effective for recognition than presenting images in a single presentation at that same clarity level. This has been attributed to interference from incorrect perceptual hypotheses formed on the initial presentations under ascending conditions. We demonstrate an analogous effect for spoken word recognition in older adults, with the size of the effect predicted by working memory span. This effect did not appear for young adults, whose group spans exceeded that of the older adults.

Cognitive aging and hearing acuity: modeling spoken language comprehension

“…As might be expected from age and inhibition arguments, the older adults in the study showed a larger interference effect from ascending presentations than the young adults. Germaine to our present question, a follow-up regression analysis revealed that participants’ reading spans, taken as a measure of working memory capacity ( Daneman and Carpenter, 1980 ; McCabe et al, 2010 ), contributed significantly to the size of the interference effect (see Lash and Wingfield, 2014 , for full details). The reading span test, which we discuss in a subsequent section, was used rather than a listening span version (e.g., Wingfield et al, 1988 ) to avoid a potential confound with hearing acuity.…”

“…This effect of working memory span on the effectiveness of inhibition can be illustrated most clearly in Figure 2 in which we have taken data from Lash and Wingfield (2014) and have plotted the percentage of correct identifications for the same gate size when words were presented in the fixed versus the ascending presentation conditions separated by participants’ working memory span. A participant was considered to have a high working memory span (left panel) if they scored greater than one standard deviation above the mean for their age cohort determined by McCabe et al (2010) , or a low span if they did not (right panel).…”

“…A subsequent study by Lash and Wingfield (2014) directly examined working memory capacity and effectiveness of inhibition in word recognition as would be predicted from observations present in the current version of the ELU model. This study was based on the finding that gradually increasing the clarity of a stimulus until it can be correctly identified retards its recognition relative to when a stimulus is presented just once, even at a level of clarity below that needed for recognition using an ascending presentation.…”

“… Lash and Wingfield (2014) conducted an analogous study for spoken words using word-onset gating with older adults ( M = 75 years) with good hearing acuity (PTA < 25 dB HL) and an age-matched group with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss. A group of young adults with normal hearing acuity was also included for comparison.…”

“…A participant was considered to have a high working memory span (left panel) if they scored greater than one standard deviation above the mean for their age cohort determined by McCabe et al (2010) , or a low span if they did not (right panel). These data are based on a subset of participants from Lash and Wingfield (2014) where high and low span participants within each participant group were equal in number and matched for age.…”