TY  - JOUR
A1  - Passow, Susanne
A1  - Westerhausen, Rene
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Hugdahl, Kenneth
A1  - Heekeren, Hauke R.
A1  - Lindenberger, Ulman
A1  - Li, Shu-Chen
T1  - Human aging compromises attentional control of auditory perception
JF  - Psychology and aging
N2  - Older adults often experience hearing difficulties in multitalker situations. Attentional control of auditory perception is crucial in situations where a plethora of auditory inputs compete for further processing. We combined an intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm with attentional manipulations to study adult age differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attentional control of auditory processing. When confronted with two competing sources of verbal auditory input, older adults modulated their attention less flexibly and were more driven by perceptual saliency than younger adults. These findings suggest that aging severely impairs the attentional regulation of auditory perception.
KW  - aging
KW  - auditory perception
KW  - attention
KW  - dichotic listening
KW  - hearing
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025667
SN  - 0882-7974
VL  - 27
IS  - 1
SP  - 99
EP  - 105
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Passow, Susanne
A1  - Westerhausen, Rene
A1  - Hugdahl, Kenneth
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Heekeren, Hauke R.
A1  - Lindenberger, Ulman
A1  - Li, Shu-Chen
T1  - Electrophysiological correlates of adult age differences in attentional control of auditory processing
JF  - Cerebral cortex
N2  - In addition to sensory decline, age-related losses in auditory perception also reflect impairments in attentional modulation of perceptual saliency. Using an attention and intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of processing conflicts between attentional focus and perceptual saliency in 25 younger and 26 older adults. Participants were instructed to attend to the right or left ear, and perceptual saliency was manipulated by varying the intensities of both ears. Attentional control demand was higher in conditions when attentional focus and perceptual saliency favored opposing ears than in conditions without such conflicts. Relative to younger adults, older adults modulated their attention less flexibly and were more influenced by perceptual saliency. Our results show, for the first time, that in younger adults a late negativity in the event-related potential (ERP) at fronto-central and parietal electrodes was sensitive to perceptual-attentional conflicts during auditory processing (N450 modulation effect). Crucially, the magnitude of the N450 modulation effect correlated positively with task performance. In line with lower attentional flexibility, the ERP waveforms of older adults showed absence of the late negativity and the modulation effect. This suggests that aging compromises the activation of the frontoparietal attentional network when processing the competing and conflicting auditory information.
KW  - aging
KW  - attention
KW  - auditory perception
KW  - conflict monitoring
KW  - ERP
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhs306
SN  - 1047-3211
SN  - 1460-2199
VL  - 24
IS  - 1
SP  - 249
EP  - 260
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Cary
ER  -