Neural signatures of temporal regularity processing in sounds differ between younger and older adults

Buckland, Chad; Johnsrude, Ingrid S.

doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2019.08.028

Cited by 50 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 108 publications

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“…A number of studies have reported amplified envelope coding as an effect of aging (Walton et al, 2002;Goossens et al, 2016;Presacco et al, 2016aPresacco et al, ,b, 2019Herrmann et al, 2017Herrmann et al, , 2019Parthasarathy et al, 2019) also in listeners with relatively normal thresholds. Normal aging has been associated neural degeneration of auditory nerve fibers (Sergeyenko et al, 2013;Wu et al, 2019), which has also been associated with hyper-excitability in the central auditory system (Herrmann et al, 2017(Herrmann et al, , 2019Parthasarathy et al, 2019). Such cochlear neuropathy can occur without hair cell damage (Viana et al, 2015) and is likely to be further advanced in older listeners with clinical threshold shifts.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Amplified Envelope Coding?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Sensorineural Hearing Loss on Cortical Synchronization to Competing Speech during Selective Attention

et al. 2020

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When selectively attending to a speech stream in multi-talker scenarios, low-frequency cortical activity is known to synchronize selectively to fluctuations in the attended speech signal. Older listeners with age-related sensorineural hearing loss (presbycusis) often struggle to understand speech in such situations, even when wearing a hearing aid. Yet, it is unclear whether a peripheral hearing loss degrades the attentional modulation of cortical speech tracking. Here, we used psychoacoustics and electroencephalography (EEG) in male and female human listeners to examine potential effects of hearing loss on EEG correlates of speech envelope synchronization in cortex. Behaviorally, older hearing-impaired (HI) listeners showed degraded speech-in-noise recognition and reduced temporal acuity compared with age-matched normal-hearing (NH) controls. During EEG recordings, we used a selective attention task with two spatially separated simultaneous speech streams where NH and HI listeners both showed high speech recognition performance. Low-frequency (Ͻ10 Hz) envelope-entrained EEG responses were enhanced in the HI listeners, both for the attended speech, but also for tone sequences modulated at slow rates (4 Hz) during passive listening. Compared with the attended speech, responses to the ignored stream were found to be reduced in both HI and NH listeners, allowing for the attended target to be classified from single-trial EEG data with similar high accuracy in the two groups. However, despite robust attention-modulated speech entrainment, the HI listeners rated the competing speech task to be more difficult. These results suggest that speech-in-noise problems experienced by older HI listeners are not necessarily associated with degraded attentional selection.

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Section: Mechanisms Of Amplified Envelope Coding?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Sensorineural Hearing Loss on Cortical Synchronization to Competing Speech during Selective Attention

et al. 2020

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“…Typically, neural synchronization with amplitude modulation focuses on the response at the stimulation frequency only (sinusoidal component) (Purcell et al, 2004;Zhu et al, 2013;Bharadwaj et al, 2015;Dimitrijevic et al, 2016;Henry et al, 2017;Herrmann et al, 2017Herrmann et al, , 2019, although synchronization patterns commonly include non-sinusoidal response features, such as responses to the harmonics (Dallos, 1973;Lins et al, 1995;Cebulla et al, 2006;Zhu et al, 2013). Further, there is evidence that analyzing non-sinusoidal signal shape features -such as sharpness -can provide important physiological information about neural signaling and system dysfunction .…”

Section: The Shape Of Synchronized Neural Activity Differs Fundamentamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Neural activity readily synchronizes with lower-frequency (<20-Hz) sinusoidal amplitude envelopes (Aiken and Picton, 2008) in all adults, but older adults often exhibit greater synchronization than younger to such amplitude modulation (AM) rates (Goossens et al, 2016;Presacco et al, 2016aPresacco et al, , 2016bHerrmann et al, 2019). Enhanced AM synchronization may be disadvantageous for speech-in-noise perception (Millman et al, 2017;Goossens et al, 2018Goossens et al, , 2019, because it may distort envelope pattern and depth cues (Moore and Glasberg, 1993;Schlittenlacher and Moore, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortical Responses to the Amplitude Envelopes of Sounds Change with Age

Irsik¹,

Almanaseer²,

Johnsrude

et al. 2020

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Many older listeners have difficulty understanding speech in noise, when cues to speech-sound identity are less redundant. The amplitude envelope of speech fluctuates dramatically over time, and features such as the rate of amplitude change at onsets (attack) and offsets (decay) signal critical information about the identity of speech sounds. Aging is also thought to be accompanied by increases in cortical excitability, which may differentially alter sensitivity to envelope dynamics. Here, we recorded electroencephalography in younger and older human adults (of both sexes) to investigate how aging affects neural synchronization to 4-Hz amplitude-modulated noises with different envelope shapes (ramped: slow attack & sharp decay; damped: sharp attack & slow decay). We observed that subcortical responses did not differ between age groups, whereas older compared to younger adults exhibited larger cortical responses to sound onsets, consistent with an increase in auditory cortical excitability. Older adults showed increased neural synchronization when the envelope shape was damped compared to ramped, whereas younger participants showed the opposite pattern. Furthermore, the response shape of synchronized neural activity was more sinusoidal in younger individuals, whereas synchronized activity in older adults was less sinusoidal and more peaked. The current results suggest that age-related changes in the excitability of auditory cortex alter responses to envelope dynamics, and this may be part of the reason why older adults experience difficulty understanding speech in noise.

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“…Sustained neural activity is a key signature associated with the processing of regular patterns in sounds. Sustained activity increases shortly after the onset of a regular pattern and has been observed for a variety of patterns, including reoccurring sequences of tone pips (Barascud et al, 2016;Southwell et al, 2017;Herrmann and Johnsrude, 2018b;Southwell and Chait, 2018), coherent chord patterns (Teki et al, 2016), and periodic amplitude and frequency modulations (Gutschalk et al, 2002;Ross et al, 2002;Herrmann and Johnsrude, 2018b;Herrmann et al, 2019). The underlying neural generators involve auditory cortex (Pantev et al, 1994;Pantev et al, 1996;Gutschalk et al, 2002;Barascud et al, 2016), and possibly also parietal cortex, frontal cortex, and hippocampus (Tiitinen et al, 2012;Barascud et al, 2016;Teki et al, 2016).…”

Section: Sustained Sustained Sustainedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustained neural activity correlates with rapid perceptual learning of auditory patterns

Herrmann

Araz

Johnsrude

2020

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Recurring structures forming regular patterns are common in sounds. Learning such patterns is thought to be crucial for accurate auditory perceptual organization (scene analysis) and efficient recognition and prediction of sounds. The current study investigated the behavioral and neural signatures of rapid perceptual learning of regular patterns in sounds. In six behavioral and EEG experiments with over 120 human participants from both sexes, we show that individuals are faster to detect regular patterns, are more sensitive to pattern deviations, and are more accurate at judging the temporal order of pattern onset relative to a visual stimulus when patterns are repeated compared to novel. Sustained neural activity indexed perceptual learning in two ways. First, sustained activity increased earlier for repeated compared to novel regular patterns when participants attended to sounds, but not when they ignored them; this earlier response increase mirrored the rapid perceptual learning we observed behaviorally. Second, the magnitude of sustained activity was reduced for repeated compared to novel patterns, independent of whether participants attended to or ignored sounds. The reduction in the magnitude of sustained activity appeared only for later stimulus presentations, suggesting it is not directly related to perceptual learning, but to processes enabled by learning. Our study thus reveals neural markers of perceptual learning of auditory patterns, and of processes that may be related to reduced novelty or better prediction of learned auditory patterns.

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Neural signatures of temporal regularity processing in sounds differ between younger and older adults

Cited by 50 publications

References 108 publications

Effects of Sensorineural Hearing Loss on Cortical Synchronization to Competing Speech during Selective Attention

Effects of Sensorineural Hearing Loss on Cortical Synchronization to Competing Speech during Selective Attention

Cortical Responses to the Amplitude Envelopes of Sounds Change with Age

Sustained neural activity correlates with rapid perceptual learning of auditory patterns

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