Age-related changes in auditory temporal processing.

Abstract

Two tone bursts separated by a silent interval and imbedded in a background white noise were presented to elderly subjects (M age = 71.3 years) and young subjects (M age = 22.2 years). Subjects were required to judge when the two tone bursts fused perceptually by adjusting the duration of tone-one. The bursts were separated by six discrete interstimulus intervals of 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, or 40 ms. The tone-two burst was held constant at 100 ms. Fusion point was defined as that critical tone-one duration at which the two tones fused (were perceived as one). Elderly subjects reached fusion point at longer critical tone-one durations than young subjects at each interval tested. The function relating tone-one duration and interval conformed to an exponential curve and is discussed with respect to an exponential decay model of the inhibitory interactions of neural systems responding to onsets and offsets of sensory events.

Influence of aging on human sound localization

“…Indeed, aside from front-back confusions, localization of the noise band centered at 0.5 kHz did not indicate difficulties in left-right discrimination with age in agreement with our data. Cranford et al (1993) reported age-related deficits in fusing clicks in a precedence effect task, suggestive of a breakdown in auditory temporal acuity (i.e., resolution), also noted in many other studies (Babkoff et al 2002;Herman et al 1977;Lister and Roberts 2005;McCroskey and Kasten 1982;Roberts and Lister 2004;Robin and Royer 1989;Ross et al 2007;Schneider and Hamstra 1999;Strouse et al 1998;von Wedel et al 1991;Warren et al 1978). Despite vastly different methodologies and focal questions of interest, these findings agree with ours in providing general evidence for age-related decline in temporal processing.…”

Aging and auditory temporal sequencing: Ordering the elements of repeating tone patterns

“…Although there is some evidence that elderly listeners have decrements in temporal acuity (Ludlow, Cudahy, & Bassich, 1982;Robin, Royer, & Gruhn, 1985), these are unlikely to be relevant here because the shortest note duration in the present study (75 msec) was well above the o 5 4 --younger _ _ _ older Nickerson & Freeman, 1974), this benefit may reach a maximum at a particular interval duration, with longer intervals reducing the coherence of sequences. Moreover, the nontonal structure of the sequences may have depressed performance.…”

Auditory Priming in Elderly Adults: Impairment of Voice-Specific Implicit Memory

“…Various kinds of data indicate that elderly adults have special difficulties processing rapid acoustic sequences (e.g. Newman & Spitzer, 1983;Robin & Royer, 1989) and time-compressed speech (e.g. Sticht & Gray, 1969).…”