Psychoacoustic Evaluation of the Effects of Aging

Abstract

Many older adults experience difficulties in complex listening environments that exceed expectations based on their audiometric thresholds. Review of past study of the auditory abilities of older adults indicates that age-related deficits are found primarily for aspects of temporal processing, with task complexity and uncertainty often increasing the effect of aging on performance. In many studies, but not all, significant association has been found between psychoacoustic measures of temporal processing and both speech-in-noise abilities and cognitive status. Intended for clinical use, a brief procedure for evaluating psychoacoustic discrimination of static and dynamic spectral patterns is discussed. Along with showing a deleterious effect of aging on task performance, results indicate significant association between discrimination ability and the cognitive status of older adults. In preliminary evaluation of longitudinal data, the rate of decline in global cognitive status was significantly associated with baseline discrimination of dynamic spectral patterns. These results are consistent with the prominence of age-related deficits for temporal processing with stimulus uncertainty increasing the psychoacoustic effect.