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The Effects of Hearing Loss on Age-related Changes in Neural Oscillatory Activity Underlying Spatial Working Memory Processing in Youth

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Grace Salloum^1,2 (), Zhiying Shen Shen^1,2,3, Jack Carroll^1,2, Clare Reinhart^1,2, Elizabeth Walker⁴, Ryan W. McCreery^2,5, Elizabeth Heinrichs-Graham^1,2,3; ¹Cognitive and Sensory Imaging Laboratory, Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, ²Center for Pediatric Brain Health, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE, ³Creighton University School of Medicine, Omaha, NE, ⁴Pediatric Audiology Lab, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, ⁵Audibility, Perception, and Cognition Laboratory, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE

Neuroimaging studies have shown that working memory-related (WM) neural dynamics change as a function of age, and these changes support improvements in performance. While children who are hard-of-hearing (CHH) are at a heightened risk for difficulties in language ability relative to children with normal hearing (CNH), less is known whether these differences extend to other cognitive domains such as spatial WM. This is especially important, as studies show a link between WM and language ability in both CNH and in CHH. To this end, this study explored whether age-related oscillatory dynamics serving spatial WM differed between CHH and CNH, and the effects on behavior. A total of 66 typically-developing CNH and 54 CHH ages 7-15 completed a modified Sternberg spatial WM task during magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG data was co-registered, pre-processed, and transformed to the time-frequency domain. Significant oscillatory responses corresponding to each phase of WM (e.g., encoding, maintenance) were imaged using beamforming and submitted to linear mixed effects modelling to determine age-related changes as a function of group. We found a significant main effect of age on accuracy and reaction time in both groups, as well as a significant age-by-group interaction on reaction time. We also found significant phase-specific changes in the age-related alterations in alpha-beta oscillatory dynamics throughout frontoparietal and temporal regions as a function of group that were uniquely related to task performance. Taken together, these data suggest that CHH show altered age-related changes in the neural dynamics serving WM function, which may underlie differences in language development.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory