Dr. Bruce Schneider: CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series

The Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain welcomes Dr. Bruce Schneider, who will present a Distinguished Lecture entitled "How age affects auditory-cognitive interactions in speech communication."

Dr.  Schneider (Psychology, U of T) is Director of the CIHR Research Group on Sensory and Cognitive Aging and Director of the Centre for Research on Biological Communication Systems.

Abstract:

Older listeners often experience communication difficulties in everyday life.  For example, in noisy environments  they often find it difficult to determine who is talking and exactly what is being said.  These difficulties could be due to 1) hearing losses, 2) age-related changes in cognitive functioning, or 3) both of these factors.  Because hearing status is highly correlated with cognitive performance in older adults, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether the communication difficulties experienced by them are a consequence of age-related changes in auditory functioning, or of cognitive declines. For example, to participate effectively in a multi- talker conversation, listeners need to do more than simply recognize and repeat speech. They have to keep track of who said what, extract the meaning of each utterance, store it in memory for future use, integrate the incoming information with what each conversational participant has said in the past, and draw on the listener’s own knowledge of the topic under consideration to extract general themes and formulate responses. In other words, to acquire and use the information contained in spoken language requires the smooth and rapid functioning of an integrated system of perceptual and cognitive processes.

I will review evidence that the operation of this integrated system of perceptual and cognitive processes is more easily disrupted in older than in younger adults, especially when there are competing sounds in the auditory scene. In particular, age-related declines in auditory processing appear to impede stream segregation in complex auditory scenes, making it more difficult for the older adult to attend to the appropriate talker. To compensate for these auditory declines, older adults have to engage cognitive resources more often and more fully than do younger adults to help parse the auditory scene and recover imperfectly-heard material, leaving fewer resources for the higher-order tasks involved in speech communication.