Home > Events > HESP Seminar Series: Jaci Schurman (HESP)

HESP Seminar Series: Jaci Schurman (HESP)

Time: 
Wednesday, February 24, 2016 - 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Location: 
LeFrak 2208

Title: "An investigation of aging and speech recognition performance under difficult working memory conditions"

Abstract: 

Previous research has shown that older listeners with normal hearing have greater difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments compared to younger listeners even during simple assessments where listeners respond to auditory stimuli immediately after presentation. Older listeners may have increased difficulty understanding speech in challenging listening situations that require the recall of prior sentences during the presentation of new auditory stimuli. The current study compared the performance of older and younger normal-hearing listeners in 0-back trials, which required immediate recall of the most recent sentence, and 1-back trials, which required the recall of the sentence preceding the most recent. Results show that older listeners have greater difficulty in the 1-back task than younger listeners with four different masker types, even when the signal-to-noise ratio was adjusted to produce 80% correct performance in the 0-back task for both groups. The finding that older listeners performed more poorly in the delayed recall task than predicted by performance in the immediate recall task highlights the speech perception difficulties that may not be assessed with simple 0-back tasks. Communication in real-world listening situations often involves remembering a spoken message over time and responding appropriately. Consequently, working memory and other cognitive processes are required in everyday listening tasks. However, most clinical speech perception tests use simple immediate recall tasks that do not capture the complexity of everyday speech. This dichotomy may be one reason why many patients perform well on standard clinical speech perception tasks in noise but report difficulty in real-world situations.