Effects of aging on signal in noise processing

噪声处理中老化对信号的影响

• 批准号: 10469791
• 负责人: Brian J. Malone
• 金额: $ 3.26万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-02-01 至 2025-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10469791
• 关键词: Acoustics; Address; Affect; Age; Age-associated memory impairment; Aging; Alzheimer' s Disease; Animals; Area; Attention; Attenuated; Auditory; Auditory area; Auditory system; Brain; Code; Cognitive deficits; Complex; Data; Depressed mood; Elderly; Environment; Equilibrium; Event; Female; Foundations; Geriatrics; Goals; Hearing; Hearing Aids; Human; Individual; Intervention; Investigation; Knowledge; Lateral; Lead; Measures; Mental Health; Mental disorders; Modeling; Monkeys; Nervous system structure; Neuraxis; Neurons; Noise; Perception; Peripheral; Population; Presbycusis; Primates; Process; Property; Research; Rodent; Self-Help Devices; Sensory; Series; Signal Transduction; Source; Speech; Speech Perception; Stimulus; Text; Visual; age effect; age related; aged; attentional modulation; auditory pathway; auditory processing; auditory stimulus; comorbidity; directed attention; experimental study; hard of hearing; insight; juvenile animal; male; neural correlate; nonhuman primate; normal hearing; programs; reconstitution; relating to nervous system; remediation; response; social; sound; suicidal

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Age-related hearing loss is a ubiquitous problem, estimated to affect up to one third of the population. This condition is much more detrimental than ‘hard of hearing’, rather, it has been implicated in a host of co-morbidities such as cognitive deficits, and other mental illness. It remains unclear if this is a cause and effect situation or an epiphenomenon. If the former, simple interventions may well lead to much better mental health among the elderly. The long-term goal of the proposed research program is to identify the neural coding principles that allow listeners to make sense of, and focus on, particular sounds (i.e. what you are listening to) when they occur mixed with other sounds (i.e. the background), something that is common in many listening situations. Although this is an extremely difficult computational problem, people with normal hearing solve it effortlessly. Unfortunately, this remarkable ability almost always declines with age, leaving individuals struggling to understand speech in noisy environments. In order to develop assistive technologies or therapies to restore this critical function, we need to understand how the brain processes sounds in complex acoustic scenes, and, in particular, exactly how it fails to do so in aged individuals. Age-related shifts in the coding strategy employed at different stages of the auditory pathway are believed to involve compensatory changes related to attenuated input from more peripheral stages, and recent research in older animals has demonstrated quantitative and qualitative changes in central neural representation of complex sounds. Crucially, these changes appear to involve changes in how information is transformed along the cortical hierarchy. For this reason, a rigorous study of the effects of age-related hearing loss must include a comparison of cortical areas, such as core versus belt, that function at different levels of the processing hierarchy in normal hearing. Moreover, these central changes impact not only ‘bottom-up’ sound processing along the ascending auditory pathway, but also ‘top-down’ modulation by attention. The proposed studies will therefore contrast how complex sounds in challenging listening environments are processed in young versus old animals while those animals are performing perceptual tasks that either do or do not require auditory attention. These studies will be the first to track changes in how multiple complex sounds are encoded across hierarchical levels of processing in the auditory pathway in a primate model of aging, while allowing direct comparisons between cortical response changes and auditory perceptual deficits.

项目概要/摘要 与年龄相关的听力损失是一个普遍存在的问题，估计影响多达三分之一的人口。这种情况比“听力困难”危害更大，相反，它与许多并发症有关，例如认知缺陷和其他精神疾病。目前尚不清楚这是因果关系还是附带现象。如果是前者，简单的干预措施很可能会改善老年人的心理健康状况。拟议研究计划的长期目标是确定神经编码原理，使听众能够理解并关注与其他声音（即背景）混合的特定声音（即您正在听的声音），这在许多聆听情况下很常见。尽管这是一个极其困难的计算问题，但听力正常的人可以毫不费力地解决它。不幸的是，这种非凡的能力几乎总是随着年龄的增长而下降，导致人们在嘈杂的环境中难以理解语音。为了开发辅助技术或疗法来恢复这一关键功能，我们需要了解大脑如何在复杂的声学场景中处理声音，特别是在老年人中大脑如何无法处理声音。听觉通路不同阶段采用的编码策略中与年龄相关的变化被认为涉及与来自更多外周阶段的输入衰减相关的补偿性变化，最近对老年动物的研究已经证明复杂声音的中枢神经表征发生了定量和定性的变化。至关重要的是，这些变化似乎涉及信息沿皮质层次结构转换方式的变化。因此，对与年龄相关的听力损失的影响进行严格的研究必须包括对在正常听力处理层次的不同级别上发挥作用的皮质区域（例如核心区域和带状区域）进行比较。此外，这些中心变化不​​仅影响沿着上升听觉通路的“自下而上”的声音处理，而且还影响注意力的“自上而下”的调制。因此，拟议的研究将对比年轻动物和年老动物在具有挑战性的听力环境中处理复杂声音的情况，而这些动物正在执行需要或不需要听觉注意的感知任务。这些研究将首次追踪灵长类衰老模型中听觉通路中多个复杂声音的编码方式的变化，同时允许直接比较皮质反应变化和听觉感知缺陷。