Hearing Acuity, Cognitive Aging, and Memory for Speech

老年人是美国人口中增长最快的部分，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，听力损失是第三大最普遍的慢性疾病，65岁以上的成年人中约有40-45%表现出一定程度的听力障碍，70岁以上的人口中这一比例上升至83%。虽然听力和认知老化研究都取得了相当大的进展，但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的研究基础上，这些研究调查了感觉-认知相互作用，因为它们影响了成年人的口语理解和记忆。一个具有理论和实践重要性的主要问题是，即使有轻微的听力损失，老年人在解码退化的语音信号时必须花费的感知努力也会吸引注意力资源，而这些注意力资源原本可以用于更高水平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实现的感觉起源。我们提出了一个研究计划，以阐明可能的机制，知觉的努力对理解和记忆的口语信息的影响。我们测试了一个假设，即与敏锐度相关的听力努力，沿着与年龄相关的工作记忆和执行功能的变化，导致句子和话语的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推进我们对认知老化的理解，同时也对提高老年人的交际效率具有重要意义。

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.