Age Effects on Preattentive and Early Attentive Auditory Processing of Redundant Stimuli: Is Sensory Gating Affected by Physiological Aging?

Abstract

The frontal hypothesis of aging predicts an age-related decline in cognitive functions requiring inhibitory or attentional regulation. In Alzheimer's disease, preattentive gating out of redundant information is impaired. Our study aimed to examine changes associated with physiological aging in both pre- and early attentive inhibition of recurrent acoustic information. Using a passive double-click paradigm, we recorded mid-latency (P30-P50) and late-latency (N100 and P200) evoked potentials in healthy young (26 ± 5 years) and healthy elderly subjects (72 ± 5 years). Physiological aging did not affect auditory gating in amplitude measures. Both age groups exhibited clear inhibition in preattentive P50 and attention-modulated (N100) components, whereas P30 was not attenuated. Irrespective of age, the magnitude of inhibition differed significantly, being most pronounced for N100 gating. Inhibition of redundant information seems to be preserved with physiological aging. Early attentive N100 gating showed the maximum effect. Further studies are warranted to evaluate sensory gating as a suitable biomarker of underlying neurodegenerative disease.

Stability of Auditory Discrimination and Novelty Processing in Physiological Aging

“…Inhibition of redundant information seems to be preserved with normal aging. Therefore, further studies are warranted to evaluate sensory gating as a suitable biomarker of underlying neurodegenerative disease [5].…”

“…The effect of selective auditory attention on this component is not due solely to an enlargement of the exogenous N100 component of the vertex potential, but rather includes the addition of a prolonged endogenous component [4]. It is believed that physiological aging does not affect this attentionmodulated component [5] which, for instance, is reduced in amplitude in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [6] that is characterized by a sub-clinical frontal patholog-ical involvement, beyond the motor areas [7,8]. The MMN is an ERP component elicited, most often in the auditory oddball paradigm, by low probability deviant stimuli embedded in a sequence of high probability standard stimuli.…”

Age-Related Effects in Working Memory Recognition Modulated by Retroactive Interference

“…Aging is associated with memory impairments (2,3), particularly in working memory (WM). This theoretical construct involves the ability to retain and actively manipulate information temporarily.…”

Optimal digital filters for analyzing the mid-latency auditory P50 event-related potential in patients with Alzheimer’s disease

“…The mid-latency auditory P50 component comprises mainly the brain's 40-Hz gamma activity (Baş ar et al, 1987;Brockhaus-Dumke et al, 2008;Gmehlin et al, 2011), thus requiring different filter settings than the analysis of the slow, long-latency ERP components (Gmehlin et al, 2011;Jerger et al, 1992). Despite the numerous studies addressing P50 sensory gating, literature does not provide rationalized guidelines for the selection of optimal filters for the analysis of the P50 component.…”

“…In contrast to a well-established sensory gating deficit in schizophrenia (Adler et al, 1982;Braff and Geyer, 1990;Freedman et al, 1991;Light and Braff, 1999), results on P50 suppression in patients with Alzheimer's disease have been contradictory (Ally et al, 2006;Cancelli et al, 2006;Fein et al, 1994;Jessen et al, 2001;Thomas et al, 2010). Since the mid-latency P50 component is highly sensitive to filter parameters (Chang et al, 2012;de Wilde et al, 2007;Freedman et al, 1998;Gmehlin et al, 2011;Jerger et al, 1992;Light and Braff, 1998;Patterson et al, 2008), in order to evaluate the validity of P50 as a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease, the effect of filtering on P50 sensory gating measures should be considered.…”