Faculty Mentor: Jack Silcox (Psychology, University of utah

Around two thirds of older adults experience hearing loss, which can make listening to conversation very fatiguing. Because this fatigue can cause older adults to withdraw socially, it has important implications for their health. The current study seeks to explore the relationship between background noise and the cognitive resources allocated toward comprehending speech—known as listening effort (LE)—through the use of electroencephalography (EEG). From an EEG signal represented in the frequency domain, we can obtain information regarding the rhythmic patterns of electrical activity in the brain, or neural oscillations. Alpha waves (8-12 Hz) are a type of neural oscillation that respond to stimuli with changes in power (amplitude squared). Increases in alpha power are often positively related to LE in the literature. What little work exists studying this relationship in older adults has obscured the current understanding of alpha power. We hypothesized that young and older adults would experience increased alpha power when listening to speech in background noise with a greater increase in older adults. To test this, we gave young and
older adults a listening task in which recorded sentences were presented either in background noise or quiet. Alpha power analysis of EEG data collected during this task revealed that neither age group showed a significant difference in alpha power between the quiet and noise conditions. While these findings may highlight key limitations in our methods, they may also provide compelling evidence that increased alpha power does not serve as a compensatory mechanism when listening to speech-in-noise (For bibliography, see references 1 – 31).

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