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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on March 31, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(3):501-512; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj175
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Feature Article

Sequential Auditory Scene Analysis Is Preserved in Normal Aging Adults

Joel S. Snyder1 and Claude Alain1,2

1 The Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Address correspondence to Joel S. Snyder, Department of Psychiatry-116A, VA Boston Healthcare System, Harvard Medical School, 940 Belmont Street, Brockton, MA 02301, USA. Email: joel_snyder{at}hms.harvard.edu.

Normal aging is accompanied by speech perception difficulties, especially in adverse listening situations such as a cocktail party. To assess whether such difficulties might be related to impairments in sequential auditory scene analysis, event-related brain potentials were recorded from normal-hearing young, middle-aged, and older adults during presentation of low (A) tones, high (B) tones, and silences (—) in repeating 3 tone triplets (ABA—). The likelihood of reporting hearing 2 streams increased as a function of the frequency difference between A and B tones ({Delta}f) to the same extent for all 3 age groups and was paralleled by enhanced sensory-evoked responses over the frontocentral scalp regions. In all 3 age groups, there was also a progressive buildup in brain activity from the beginning to the end of the sequence of triplets, which was characterized by an enhanced positivity that peaked at about 200 ms after the onset of each ABA— triplet. Similar {Delta}f- and buildup-related activity also occurred over the right temporal cortex, but only for young adults. We conclude that age-related difficulties in separating competing speakers are unlikely to arise from deficits in streaming and might instead reflect less efficient concurrent sound segregation.

Key Words: aging • auditory cortex • auditory scene analysis • dipole source analysis • event-related potentials


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