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Exploring the interplay between age-related hearing loss and cognitive decline through the lens of sensory and cognitive event-related potentials.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Sara Jani^1,2 (sara.jani@mail.utoronto.ca), Claude Alain^1,2; ¹University of Toronto, ²Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Hospital, Toronto, Ontario

Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is the gradual decline in hearing ability that occurs as adults age. It is thought to be the most prevalent sensory impairment in older adults, with an estimated 63% of those over 70 experiencing deficits severe enough to impair their ability to communicate. Evidence suggests that ARHL has a multifaceted impact on long-term health, psychosocial well-being, and long-term broad cognitive outcomes in older adults. However, few studies have assessed specific cognitive function and its relationship to neural activity in response to auditory stimuli in older adults with ARHL. Auditory evoked responses were measured in 59 participants (mean age = 71.4 years, 47% female) with bilateral mild-to-moderate ARHL, using 64-channel electroencephalography. Participants underwent a pure tone audiometry test, followed by the Toronto Cognitive Assessment (TorCA). Participants completed an auditory target detection task, in which they were presented with the English consonant-vowel phonemes /ba/, /pa/ and /ta/, and asked to respond with a button press to the syllable /ta/. They then completed a word-pair semantic priming task, in which they were asked to judge the semantic relatedness of word pairs. Analysis is ongoing. Preliminary findings indicate that neural responses to speech stimuli (e.g., the P100, mismatch negativity, and P3b event-related potential components) are significantly predicted by TorCA scores and ARHL severity. Next steps will include proposing structural equation models that explore the relative contributions of ARHL and cognitive impairment to the age-related changes in neural activity and speech processing ability displayed by older adults.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition