Gillingham Susan M, Vallesi Antonino, Pichora-Fuller M Kathleen, Alain Claude
Baycrest Health Sciences, Rotman Research Institute (RRI), Toronto, ON, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2018 Nov 6;10:351. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2018.00351. eCollection 2018.
Evidence from epidemiological, laboratory and clinical research suggests a link between age-related auditory declines and domain-general cognitive declines. Nevertheless, few studies have experimentally compared measures of non-auditory cognitive functions in younger normal hearing adults (YN), older adults with typical hearing thresholds for their age (ONHA) and older adults with clinically significant threshold hearing loss (OHL). The current study investigated the differences between these groups on measures of attentional response selection and execution to visual stimuli. A visual reaction time (RT) paradigm involving four tasks with differing and hierarchical attentional demands was administered. RTs on trials with differing foreperiods (FPs; pre-stimulus waiting times) were analyzed to assess context-related slowing, error commission and related cognitive control and strategic and automatic neural preparatory processes. The OHL group demonstrated a general slowing that was most apparent on the simplest tasks. Although the number of errors was similar when comparing all three groups, the OHL group exhibited less control over recovery from an error compared to the younger and ONHA groups. Unlike the YN and ONHA groups, the OHL group also showed difficulties with both strategic and automatic response preparation, although automatic preparation was more affected across all tasks. This pattern of results suggests that in older adults with hearing loss there is an underlying difficulty in automatic temporal processing that can affect higher order cognitive functions, although there may not be a completely generalized decline in cognitive functioning that is associated with hearing loss.
流行病学、实验室及临床研究的证据表明，与年龄相关的听觉衰退和非听觉领域的认知衰退之间存在联系。然而，很少有研究通过实验比较年轻听力正常成年人（YN）、听力阈值符合其年龄特征的老年人（ONHA）和临床上有显著阈值性听力损失的老年人（OHL）在非听觉认知功能方面的测量结果。本研究调查了这些组在对视觉刺激的注意力反应选择和执行测量方面的差异。采用了一种视觉反应时（RT）范式，该范式涉及四项具有不同层次注意力需求的任务。分析了不同前间隔（FP；刺激前等待时间）试验中的反应时，以评估与情境相关的反应减慢、错误发生率以及相关的认知控制、策略性和自动神经准备过程。OHL组表现出普遍的反应减慢，在最简单的任务中最为明显。尽管比较所有三组时错误数量相似，但与年轻组和ONHA组相比，OHL组在从错误中恢复方面表现出较少的控制能力。与YN组和ONHA组不同，OHL组在策略性和自动反应准备方面也存在困难，尽管自动准备在所有任务中受影响更大。这种结果模式表明，在听力损失的老年人中，自动时间处理存在潜在困难，这可能会影响高阶认知功能，尽管与听力损失相关的认知功能可能并非完全普遍衰退。
