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

• Applicants: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Janina Fels; Professor Dr. Iring Koch
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Acoustics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513033051

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants