Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, 1771Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Trends Hear. 2022 Jan-Dec;26:23312165211066180. doi: 10.1177/23312165211066180.
This study was designed to examine age effects on various auditory perceptual skills using a large group of listeners (155 adults, 121 aged 60-88 years and 34 aged 18-30 years), while controlling for the factors of hearing loss and working memory (WM). All subjects completed 3 measures of WM, 7 psychoacoustic tasks (24 conditions) and a hearing assessment. Psychophysical measures were selected to tap phenomena thought to be mediated by higher-level auditory function and included modulation detection, modulation detection interference, informational masking (IM), masking level difference (MLD), anisochrony detection, harmonic mistuning, and stream segregation. Principal-components analysis (PCA) was applied to each psychoacoustic test. For 6 of the 7 tasks, a single component represented performance across the multiple stimulus conditions well, whereas the modulation-detection interference (MDI) task required two components to do so. The effect of age was analyzed using a general linear model applied to each psychoacoustic component. Once hearing loss and WM were accounted for as covariates in the analyses, estimated marginal mean thresholds were lower for older adults on tasks based on temporal processing. When evaluated separately, hearing loss led to poorer performance on roughly 1/2 the tasks and declines in WM accounted for poorer performance on 6 of the 8 psychoacoustic components. These results make clear the need to interpret age-group differences in performance on psychoacoustic tasks in light of cognitive declines commonly associated with aging, and point to hearing loss and cognitive declines as negatively influencing auditory perceptual skills.
本研究旨在使用大量听众（155 名成年人，121 名年龄在 60-88 岁，34 名年龄在 18-30 岁），控制听力损失和工作记忆（WM）的因素，研究年龄对各种听觉感知技能的影响。所有受试者均完成了 3 项 WM 测试、7 项心理物理任务（24 种条件）和听力评估。心理物理测量被选择来测试被认为由高级听觉功能介导的现象，包括调制检测、调制检测干扰、信息掩蔽（IM）、掩蔽水平差（MLD）、非同步检测、谐波失谐和流分离。对每个心理物理测试都应用了主成分分析（PCA）。对于 7 项任务中的 6 项任务，单个成分可以很好地代表多个刺激条件下的性能，而调制检测干扰（MDI）任务则需要两个成分来实现。使用应用于每个心理物理成分的一般线性模型分析年龄的影响。在分析中，将听力损失和 WM 作为协变量进行考虑后，年龄较大的成年人在基于时间处理的任务上的估计边际平均阈值较低。当单独评估时，听力损失导致大约一半任务的表现下降，而 WM 的下降则导致 8 个心理物理成分中的 6 个的表现下降。这些结果清楚地表明，需要根据与衰老相关的认知能力下降来解释心理物理任务中表现的年龄组差异，并指出听力损失和认知能力下降对听觉感知能力有负面影响。
