Aging alters the perception and physiological representation of frequency: Evidence from human frequency-following response recordings

Clinard, Christopher G.; Tremblay, Kelly L.; Krishnan, Ananthanarayan

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2009.11.010

Cited by 166 publications

(180 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…Individuals with poorer peripheral encoding (like our bottom-quartile listeners) may struggle to communicate or even withdraw entirely in such settings (38). Such listeners are likely to be particularly vulnerable when faced with everyday challenges that listeners with more robust auditory peripheral coding can handle relatively gracefully, from listening in reverberant or noisy rooms to dealing with the normal effects of aging on auditory processing (39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46). Our results suggest an approach for teasing apart peripheral and central factors that contribute to hearing difficulties in daily life.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normal hearing is not enough to guarantee robust encoding of suprathreshold features important in everyday communication

Ruggles

Bharadwaj

Shinn‐Cunningham

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

164

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"Normal hearing" is typically defined by threshold audibility, even though everyday communication relies on extracting key features of easily audible sound, not on sound detection. Anecdotally, many normal-hearing listeners report difficulty communicating in settings where there are competing sound sources, but the reasons for such difficulties are debated: Do these difficulties originate from deficits in cognitive processing, or differences in peripheral, sensory encoding? Here we show that listeners with clinically normal thresholds exhibit very large individual differences on a task requiring them to focus spatial selective auditory attention to understand one speech stream when there are similar, competing speech streams coming from other directions. These individual differences in selective auditory attention ability are unrelated to age, reading span (a measure of cognitive function), and minor differences in absolute hearing threshold; however, selective attention ability correlates with the ability to detect simple frequency modulation in a clearly audible tone. Importantly, we also find that selective attention performance correlates with physiological measures of how well the periodic, temporal structure of sounds above the threshold of audibility are encoded in early, subcortical portions of the auditory pathway. These results suggest that the fidelity of early sensory encoding of the temporal structure in suprathreshold sounds influences the ability to communicate in challenging settings. Tests like these may help tease apart how peripheral and central deficits contribute to communication impairments, ultimately leading to new approaches to combat the social isolation that often ensues.auditory processing disorder | frequency following response | individual differences | auditory scene analysis | informational masking M aking sense of conversations in busy restaurants or streets is a challenge, as competing sound sources add up to create a confusing cacophony. Central to communicating in such environments is selective attention, the process that enables listeners to filter out unwanted events and focus on a desired source (1). By listening for an object with a particular attribute (for instance, by focusing on the source from straight ahead), competing sound sources can be suppressed and the desired object brought into a listener's attentional focus (2-4).Many listeners with clinically normal hearing complain of difficulties with selective auditory attention (5). Because such difficulties manifest in complex everyday tasks, they are often assumed to arise from central processing deficits (6, 7). However, there is no real consensus: Are "normal-hearing" listeners who have trouble conversing in ordinary social settings suffering from a central deficit, or is there a peripheral cause (8, 9)? Reflecting this ongoing debate, clinical diagnoses use a range of labels to describe normal-hearing listeners who cannot communicate easily when there are competing sound sources; there is no standard procedure for ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normal hearing is not enough to guarantee robust encoding of suprathreshold features important in everyday communication

Ruggles

Bharadwaj

Shinn‐Cunningham

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

164

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“…Specifically, age-related differences in suprathreshold temporal processing have emerged as one of the main characteristic of auditory aging across a range of psychoacoustic studies (for a review, see Fitzgibbons & Gordon-Salant 2010), with converging physiological evidence (e.g., Clinard et al 2010;Anderson et al 2012;Lopez-Poveda 2014). These changes in temporal auditory processing are thought to underpin problems understanding speech in noise and also remembering it once it has been heard.…”

Section: Clinical Relevance Of Auditory-cognitive Interactions and LImentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy: The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL)

et al. 2016

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5SThe Fifth Eriksholm Workshop on "Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy" was convened to develop a consensus among interdisciplinary experts about what is known on the topic, gaps in knowledge, the use of terminology, priorities for future research, and implications for practice. The general term cognitive energy was chosen to facilitate the broadest possible discussion of the topic. It goes back to Titchener (1908) who described the effects of attention on perception; he used the term psychic energy for the notion that limited mental resources can be flexibly allocated among perceptual and mental activities. The workshop focused on three main areas: (1) theories, models, concepts, definitions, and frameworks; (2) methods and measures; and (3) knowledge translation. We defined effort as the deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles in goal pursuit when carrying out a task, with listening effort applying more specifically when tasks involve listening. We adapted Kahneman's seminal (1973) Capacity Model of Attention to listening and proposed a heuristically useful Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL). Our FUEL incorporates the well-known relationship between cognitive demand and the supply of cognitive capacity that is the foundation of cognitive theories of attention. Our FUEL also incorporates a motivation dimension based on complementary theories of motivational intensity, adaptive gain control, and optimal performance, fatigue, and pleasure. Using a three-dimensional illustration, we highlight how listening effort depends not only on hearing difficulties and task demands but also on the listener's motivation to expend mental effort in the challenging situations of everyday life.

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“…Older adults, even with hearing sensitivity within clinically normal limits, have difficulty in perceptual tasks involving static frequency, such as frequency discrimination of tonebursts with fixed frequencies (Clinard et al, 2010;He et al, 1998). Tests involving dynamic frequency content, where the frequency content of a sound increases or decreases over its duration, also show age-related declines; tasks such as frequency modulation detection (Grose et al, 2012b;He et al, 2007) and vowel identification from formant transitions (Harkrider et al, 2005) have demonstrated poorer performance in older adults, even when hearing sensitivity is clinically normal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The FFR's reliance on phase locking makes it a potential marker for identifying age-related degradations of neural synchrony. Frequency representation is degraded in middle-aged and older adults, as demonstrated by poorer FFR phase coherence and amplitude to static tones at and around 1000 Hz, but not at lower frequencies at and around 500 Hz (Clinard et al, 2010;Grose et al, 2012a). FFRs have been elicited by a variety of static stimuli, including brief tones and two-tone models of formants (Krishnan, 1999(Krishnan, , 2002, but little is known about representation of formant transitions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural representation of dynamic frequency is degraded in older adults

Clinard

Cotter

2015

Hearing Research

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Aging alters the perception and physiological representation of frequency: Evidence from human frequency-following response recordings

Cited by 166 publications

References 68 publications

Normal hearing is not enough to guarantee robust encoding of suprathreshold features important in everyday communication

Normal hearing is not enough to guarantee robust encoding of suprathreshold features important in everyday communication

Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy: The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL)

Neural representation of dynamic frequency is degraded in older adults

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