Hearing Acuity, Cognitive Aging, and Memory for Speech

听力敏锐度、认知老化和言语记忆

• 批准号: 8371380
• 负责人: Arthur Wingfield
• 金额: $ 30.51万
• 依托单位: BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-09-15 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8371380
• 关键词: Adult; Affect; Age; Aging; Chronic; Cognitive; Cognitive aging; Communication; Comprehension; Early Diagnosis; Effectiveness; Elderly; Equilibrium; Expectancy; Face; Failure; Family; Financial compensation; Friends; Goals; Healthcare; Hearing; Knowledge; Language; Lead; Medical; Memory; Outcomes Research; Pattern; Performance; Population; Presbycusis; Process; Provider; Research; Resources; Semantics; Sensory; Short-Term Memory; Signal Transduction; Social Work; Social isolation; Speech; Testing; Work; age related; aging brain; design; executive function; hearing impairment; heuristics; improved; knowledge base; programs; research study; social; success; theories; young adult

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older adults are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, with the number of adults age 65 or older expected to grow to 70.3 million in 2030. Among this group, hearing loss is the third most prevalent chronic medical condition, with some 40-45% of adults over the age of 65 showing some degree of hearing impairment, rising to 83% in the population over the age of 70. Although considerable progress has been made in both audition and cognitive aging research, hearing loss has primarily been considered as an independent issue. This competing renewal builds on ten years of research investigating sensory-cognitive interactions as they affect spoken language comprehension and memory in adult aging. A major concern of both theoretical and practical importance is that even with a mild hearing loss, the perceptual effort older adults must expend on decoding a degraded speech signal will draw attentional resources that would otherwise be available for higher-level sentence comprehension and encoding what has been heard in memory. As such, a memory or comprehension deficit in many older adults may have an unrealized sensory origin. We propose a program of research to elucidate the mechanisms that may underlie the effect of perceptual effort on comprehension and memory for spoken information. We test a hypothesis that acuity-related listening effort, along with age-related changes in working memory and executive function, lead to a qualitative change in how sentences and discourse are processed, with results that can lead to both comprehension successes and failures. Successful outcome of this research will advance our understanding of cognitive aging at the level of theory, but also with implications for improving communicative effectiveness in older adulthood. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Adult aging represents a balance of decline and compensation. Nowhere is this balance more important than in the ability to understand, and recall the content of, meaningful speech. When cognitive aging is accompanied by even a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, the result can be devastating to communicative effectiveness between the older adult and health care and social service providers, as well as leading to social isolation from family and friends. This research program is designed to close a critical gap in our knowledge of the interacting effects of cognitive aging and age-related hearing loss on everyday speech comprehension in older adults, and may also serve as a framework for early detection of pathological change as it affects language comprehension in the aging brain.

描述（由申请人提供）：老年人是美国人口中增长最快的群体，预计到 2030 年，65 岁或以上的成年人数量将增长到 7030 万。在这一群体中，听力损失是第三大常见的慢性疾病，约 40-45% 的 65 岁以上成年人表现出一定程度的听力障碍，在 70 岁以上人口中上升到 83%。尽管已经取得了相当大的进展在试镜和 认知衰老研究中，听力损失主要被认为是一个独立的问题。这种竞争性的更新建立在十年来调查感官认知相互作用的研究基础上，因为它们影响成人衰老过程中的口语理解和记忆。理论和实际重要性的一个主要问题是，即使有轻微的听力损失，老年人在解码退化的语音信号上必须花费的感知努力将吸引注意力资源，否则这些注意力资源可用于更高级别的句子理解和编码记忆中听到的内容。因此，许多老年人的记忆或理解缺陷可能有一个未意识到的感觉起源。我们提出了一项研究计划，以阐明感知努力对口头信息的理解和记忆产生影响的机制。我们测试了一个假设，即与敏锐度相关的听力努力，以及与年龄相关的工作记忆和执行功能的变化，导致句子和话语处理方式发生质的变化，其结果可能导致理解的成功和失败。这项研究的成功结果将在理论层面上增进我们对认知衰老的理解，同时也对提高老年人的沟通有效性产生影响。 公共卫生相关性：成人衰老代表着衰退和补偿的平衡。这种平衡比理解和回忆有意义的演讲内容的能力更重要。当认知衰老伴随着轻度至中度听力损失时，其结果可能会严重影响老年人与医疗保健和社会服务提供者之间的沟通效率，并导致与家人和朋友的社会孤立。该研究计划旨在缩小关键差距 据我们所知，认知衰老和与年龄相关的听力损失对老年人日常言语理解的相互作用影响，并且还可以作为早期检测病理变化的框架，因为它影响衰老大脑的语言理解。