Sound offset-related brain potentials show retained sensory processing, but increased cognitive control activity in older adults

Abstract

This is the accepted version of Horváth, J., Gaál, Z. A., & Volosin, M. (2017). Sound offset-related brain potentials show retained sensory processing, but increased cognitive control activity in older adults. Neurobiology of Aging, 57,[232][233][234][235][236][237][238][239][240][241][242][243][244][245][246] AbstractIt has been hypothesized that age-related hearing loss is caused not only by peripheral, but also central changes in the auditory system. Many studies utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by sound onsets to characterize age-related differences in central auditory processing. Age-related ERP enhancements in such studies have often been interpreted in terms of elevated sensitivity to auditory stimulation. Such ERPs, however, comprise various components reflecting different aspects of auditory and task-related processing. The composition of the waveforms may considerably differ for ERPs elicited by other auditory events. In the present study ERPs elicited by tone-offsets were used to characterize processing differences between younger and older adults in a short-go, tone-duration discrimination paradigm. Whereas the onset-related auditory ERP was enhanced in the older adult group, no age-related differences were found in the offset-related auditory ERPs observable at temporal electrodes. In older adults, however, offset-related processing was dominated by an N2 that could reflect enhanced cognitive control activities. Because N2 was present regardless discrimination difficulty, younger adults may have framed the task as offset-detection, whereas older adults represented the task as "genuine" discrimination.

Electrophysiological Correlates of The Attention-Distraction Balance

“…A further study of our research group (Horváth, Gaál & Volosin, 2017) demonstrated additional evidence to enhanced cognitive control in the older adults.…”

“…5.1) which exhibit a negative, CNV-like (Walter et al, 1964) going trend before the onset of each tone. Although we did not analyze this baseline part of ERPs, its presence was demonstrated in numerous studies (Berti & Schröger, 2001;Horváth, 2014a;Horváth, Gaál & Volosin, 2017;Schröger & Wolff, 1998b) utilizing constant SOAs in different oddball tasks. Beside of the regular pace of presentation, a second informative foreperiod also characterized the stimuli in the Study I.…”

Cortical auditory evoked potentials in mild cognitive impairment: Evidence from a temporal‐spatial principal component analysis

“…The tsPCAs solutions extracted different factors resembling Ta and Tb components. As far as we know, the components underlying this complex have not been previously studied in participants with MCI, and minimally among CNOA (Horváth, Gaál, & Volosin, 2017), making it difficult to draw any conclusions.…”