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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Tim GriffithsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2024.Interest in how ageing affects attention is long-standing, although interactions between sensory and attentional processing in older age are not fully understood. Here, we examined interactions between peripheral hearing and selective attention in a spatialised cocktail party listening paradigm, in which three talkers spoke different sentences simultaneously and participants were asked to report the sentence spoken by a talker at a particular location. By comparing a sample of older (N = 61; age = 55–80 years) and younger (N = 58; age = 18–35 years) adults, we show that, as a group, older adults benefit as much as younger adults from preparatory spatial attention. Although, for older adults, this benefit significantly reduces with greater age-related hearing loss. These results demonstrate that older adults with excellent hearing retain the ability to direct spatial selective attention, but this ability deteriorates, in a graded manner, with age-related hearing loss. Thus, reductions in spatial selective attention likely contribute to difficulties communicating in social settings for older adults with age-related hearing loss. Overall, these findings demonstrate a relationship between mild perceptual decline and attention in older age.
Author(s): Caso A, Griffiths TD, Holmes E
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Scientific Reports
Year: 2024
Volume: 14
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 31/10/2024
Acceptance date: 18/10/2024
Date deposited: 18/11/2024
ISSN (electronic): 2045-2322
Publisher: Nature Research
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-77102-5
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-77102-5
Data Access Statement: Experiment files, data, and analysis code for this study are publicly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) and can be accessed at https://osf.io/gvys3/?view_only=f7f27642ef984c3aa10ab046135b8862
PubMed id: 39482327
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