Age-dependent changes in mechanisms of auditory attentional shifts in selective hearing: Correlational approach to differences in auditory thresholds and experimental manipulation by hearing loss simulation

选择性倾听是听觉注意的一个主要功能。复杂的听觉场景需要潜在的注意过程，这些场景需要在不同声源（例如，人）之间灵活切换，通常被称为“鸡尾酒会”场景。之前对声学和认知心理学申请者的研究使用了分类任务（“目标单词是大于5还是小于5 ?”）在年轻的成年参与者中，当目标选择标准（如说话者性别）在不同的试验中发生变化时，他们在反应时间和错误率方面的表现成本。此外，如果不相关（干扰）言语要求竞争性反应，则存在不一致成本。在这种情况下，年龄较大的参与者通常会有更多的听力困难，并表现出更大的不一致成本，这可能是由于年龄相关的干扰物抑制缺陷。然而，很难将与年龄相关的感觉缺陷（即听力阈值增加）与与年龄相关的认知（注意力）缺陷分离开来。该项目旨在分离这些过程。一方面，个体的听力阈值（听力图）将系统地与行为客观表现测量相关联，以系统地控制与年龄相关的感觉缺陷。另一方面，我们将开发并验证一个模拟器，以再现（即听觉）与年龄相关的听力缺陷，以便我们可以为正常听力的年轻参与者生成“听力损失模拟”。通过这种方式，我们可以通过建立可比较的感觉处理（即听觉阈值）来系统地比较年轻和老年参与者的表现，以隔离注意力因素。我们还可以在保持年龄相关因素不变的情况下，对有听力损失模拟和没有听力损失模拟的年轻人进行性能比较，以隔离感官因素的影响。此外，我们将开发新的实验范式来研究选择性听力中的抑制加工。我们打算在未来的研究中使用这些范式，并在第二个资助期使用即将开发的听力损失模拟器，在这个研究中，我们试图更详细地分离年龄相关表现差异背后的认知注意机制。总之，从这个项目中，我们期望对更好地理解选择性听力中听觉注意的机制以及它们在老年时的损害（及其补偿的技术方法）做出重要贡献。

Selective listening is a major function of auditory attention. The underlying attentional processes are needed in complex auditory scenes that require flexible switching between different sound sources (e.g., persons) and that are often referred to as “cocktail party” scenes. Previous studies of the applicants from acoustics and cognitive psychology used classification tasks (“is the target word a number smaller or larger than five?”) and demonstrated, in young adult participants, performance costs in reaction times and error rates when the target selection criterion (e.g., speaker gender) changes from trial to trial. In addition, there were incongruency costs if the irrelevant (distractor) speech calls for a competing response. Older participants have generally more listening difficulties in such situations and show larger incongruency costs, which might be due to age-related deficits in distractor inhibition. Yet, it is difficult to dissociate age-related sensory deficits (i.e., increased hearing thresholds) from age-related cognitive (attentional) deficits. The project aims at dissociating these processes. One the one hand, individual hearing thresholds (audiograms) will be related systematically to behavioral objective performance measures of attention to control for age-related sensory deficits systematically. On the other hand, we will develop and validate a simulator that reproduces (i.e., auralize) age-related hearing deficits, so that we can generate a “hearing loss simulation” for normal hearing young participants. This way, we can conduct systematic comparisons of performance of young and old participants by establishing comparable sensory processing (i.e., hearing thresholds) in order to isolate attentional factors. We can also conduct comparisons of performance of young adults with vs. without hearing loss simulation while holding constant age-related factors in order to isolate the influence of sensory factors. Furthermore, we will develop new experimental paradigms to examine inhibitory processing in selective listening. We intend to use these paradigms in future studies with the to-be-developed hearing-loss simulator in a second funding period, in which we seek to isolate the cognitive attentional mechanisms underlying age-related performance differences in more detail. Altogether, from this project we expect an important contribution to a better understanding of the mechanisms of auditory attention in selective listening as well as of their impairments (and technical methods for its compensation) in old age.