Auditory and cognitive effects of aging on perception of environmental sounds in natural auditory scenes.
OBJECTIVE
Previously, Gygi and Shafiro (2011) found that when environmental sounds are semantically incongruent with the background scene (e.g., horse galloping in a restaurant), they can be identified more accurately by young normal-hearing listeners (YNH) than sounds congruent with the scene (e.g., horse galloping at a racetrack). This study investigated how age and high-frequency audibility affect this Incongruency Advantage (IA) effect.


METHODS
In Experiments 1a and 1b, elderly listeners ( N = 18 for 1a; N = 10 for 1b) with age-appropriate hearing (EAH) were tested on target sounds and auditory scenes in 5 sound-to-scene ratios (So/Sc) between -3 and -18 dB. Experiment 2 tested 11 YNH on the same sound-scene pairings lowpass-filtered at 4 kHz (YNH-4k).


RESULTS
The EAH and YNH-4k groups exhibited an almost identical pattern of significant IA effects, but both were at approximately 3.9 dB higher So/Sc than the previously tested YNH listeners. However, the psychometric functions revealed a shallower slope for EAH listeners compared with YNH listeners for the congruent stimuli only, suggesting a greater difficulty for the EAH listeners in attending to sounds expected to occur in a scene.


CONCLUSIONS
These findings indicate that semantic relationships between environmental sounds in soundscapes are mediated by both audibility and cognitive factors and suggest a method for dissociating these factors.
Correspondence to Brian Gygi: bgygi@ebire.org.
Brian
B
Gygi
Valeriy
V
Shafiro
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011304:Presbycusis / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011594:Psychometrics; D012660:Semantics
aging; auditory rehabilitation; cognition; development; gerontology; hearing loss; psychoacoustics