FALSE HEARING IN YOUNG AND OLDER ADULTS: A METACOGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

描述(由申请人提供)：“你没有认真听我说，我说的是……”对于老年人来说，这种交流再熟悉不过了。这个问题主要是反映了与年龄相关的感觉能力障碍，还是更具认知性，反映了未能认真倾听？准确的言语感知需要听者评估 关于口语通信内容的多个不同的信息源，包括语音信号和语义上下文。在某些情况下，这些不同的信息来源汇聚在相同的感知上，而在另一些情况下，它们可以导致截然不同的感知反应。例如，一个人在与医生办公室的护士交谈时，如果护士主要依赖于上下文驱动的信息，那么他可能会将“医生说要提醒你拿账单”这句话误解为“医生说要提醒你吃药”。在我们最初在这一领域的工作中(Rogers，Jacoby和Sommers，2012)，我们创造了术语“虚假听力”，指的是个体更多地依赖于语境驱动的知觉错误 而不是感官驱动的信息，但他们仍然高度自信地认为他们实际上“听到”了刺激。这项拟议的研究将调查年长和年轻的成年人在在线言语感知过程中如何权衡感觉信息和语义语境。此外，我们还将确定诸如Bill-Pill错误等错误在多大程度上反映了元认知失败 这也会在其他知觉和认知领域产生类似的错误。该应用程序具有很高的创新性，因为它整合了认知、元认知和听力学的原理，以检查与年龄相关的认知控制能力的下降如何可能损害老年人灵活改变其反应基础的能力。具体地说，我们提出，在同等可理解性的条件下，老年人会比感觉信号更重地将语义语境作为反应的基础，并且在被当时的环境所支配时，老年人在转换到基于感觉的反应时会比年轻的听者更不灵活。申请中将涉及三个具体目标。具体目标1将确定与年龄相关的元认知能力的变化如何影响听者对他们的言语感知困难的意识，使用比以前更自然的(句子)刺激。具体目标2将研究认知控制方面的个体和年龄差异如何改变交际行为，如要求重复和仔细倾听，从而显著改善老年人的言语感知。具体目标3将评估错误听力、错误观看和错误记忆的测量之间的相关性，以确定这些类型的错误可能在多大程度上可归因于共同的机制，如认知控制。综上所述，这些发现将首次研究元认知能力在在线言语感知过程中是如何运作的，以及与年龄相关的元认知能力下降是否会导致老年人较差的言语感知表现。 与公共卫生相关：随着个人年龄的增长，听力会逐渐丧失。然而，我们实验室的惊人结果表明，在许多情况下，老年人没有意识到这种听力损失如何影响他们的言语理解能力。在当前的应用中，我们研究了未能识别言语感知缺陷如何影响行为，如要求重复、在不理解的情况下做出反应和获得助听器，这些行为可能会极大地影响老年人使用口语进行沟通的能力。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): "You are not really listening to me, what I said was..." For older adults, exchanges of this sort are all too familiar. Is the problem one that primarily reflects age-related impairments in sensory abilities or, instead, is it more cognitive in nature, reflecting a failure to carefully listen? Accurate speech perception requires listeners to evaluate a number of different sources of information about the content of spoken communications, including the speech signal and semantic context. In some instances, these different sources of information converge on the same perception, whereas in others they can lead to dramatically different perceptual responses. For example, an individual speaking to a nurse at a physician's office who is relying primarily on context-driven information might misperceive the sentence "The Doctor said to remind you to take the BILL" as "The Doctor said to remind you to take the PILL". In our initial work in this area (Rogers, Jacoby, and Sommers, 2012), we have coined the term "false hearing" to refer to perceptual errors in which individuals rely more on context-driven than sensory-driven information, yet are nevertheless highly confident that they actually "heard" the stimulus. The proposed research will investigate how older and younger adults weigh sensory information and semantic context during online speech perception. In addition, we will establish the extent to which errors such as the "Bill-Pill" mistake reflect metacognitive failures that also produce analogous errors in other perceptual and cognitive domains. The application is highly innovative in that it integrates principles of cognition, metacognition and audiology to examine how age-related reductions in cognitive control may impair older adults' ability to flexibly vary their bases of responding. Specifically, we propose that, under conditions of equivalent intelligibility, older adults will weigh semantic context more heavily than the sensory signal as a basis for responding and will be less flexible than young listeners in switching to sensory- based responding when dictated by the prevailing circumstances. Three specific aims will be addressed in the application. Specific Aim 1 will establish how age-related changes in metacognitive abilities affect listeners' awareness of their speech perception difficulties using more naturalistic (sentence) stimuli than has been used previously. Specific aim 2 will examine how individual and age differences in cognitive control might alter communicative behaviors, such as requesting repetitions and careful listening, that could substantially improve speech perception in older adults. Specific Aim 3 will assess correlations between measures of false hearing, false seeing and false remembering to establish the extent to which these types of errors may be attributable to a common mechanism, such as cognitive control. Taken together, the findings will provide the first studies of how metacognitive abilities operate during online speech perception and whether age-related declines in metacognition contribute to the poorer speech perception performance of older adults. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: As individuals age, there is a gradual and progressive loss of hearing. Striking results from our laboratory suggest, however, that there are many instances in which older adults are unaware of how this hearing loss affects their ability to understand speech. In the current application, we examine how failures to recognize speech perception deficits affects behaviors such as asking for repetitions, responding without understanding, and obtaining hearing aids, that can dramatically affect how well older adults are able to communicate using spoken language.