scholarly journals The effect of healthy aging on change detection and sensitivity to predictable sturcture in crowded acoustic scenes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathilde de Kerangal ◽  
Deborah Vickers ◽  
Maria Chait

The auditory system plays a critical role in supporting our ability to detect abrupt changes in our surroundings. Here we study how this capacity is affected in the course of healthy ageing. Artifical acoustic ‘scenes’, populated by multiple concurrent streams of pure tones (‘sources’) were used to capture the challenges of listening in complex acoustic environments. Two scene conditions were included: REG scenes consisted of sources characterized by a regular temporal structure. Matched RAND scenes contained sources which were temporally random. Changes, manifested as the abrupt disappearance of one of the sources, were introduced to a subset of the trials and participants (‘young’ group N=41, age 20-38 years; ‘older’ group N=41, age 60-82 years) were instructed to monitor the scenes for these events. Previous work demonstrated that young listeners exhibit better change detection performance in REG scenes, reflecting sensitivity to temporal structure. Here we sought to determine: (1) Whether ‘baseline’ change detection ability (i.e. in RAND scenes) is affected by age. (2) Whether aging affects listeners’ sensitivity to temporal regularity. (3) How change detection capacity relates to listeners’ hearing and cognitive profile. The results demonstrated that healthy aging is associated with reduced sensitivity to abrupt scene changes in RAND scenes but that performance does not correlate with age or standard audiological measures such as pure tone audiometry or speech in noise performance. Remarkably older listeners’ change detection performance improved substantially (up to the level exhibited by young listeners) in REG relative to RAND scenes. This suggests that the capacity to extract and track the regularity associated with scene sources, even in crowded acoustic environments, is relatively preserved in older listeners.

Author(s):  
Amy L. Alexander ◽  
Christopher D. Wickens

Twenty-four certified flight instructors were required to fly a series of curved, step-down approaches while detecting changes to surrounding traffic aircraft and weather cell icons on two integrated hazard display (IHD) formats (2D coplanar and split-screen) under varying workload levels. Generally, it appears that the 2D coplanar IHD was better in supporting flightpath tracking and change detection performance when compared to a split-screen display. Pilots exhibited superior flightpath tracking (in the vertical dimension, and under low workload) when using the 2D coplanar IHD, although this effect was mitigated by increasing workload such that tracking deteriorated faster with the 2D coplanar than the split-screen display. The spawned 3D cost of diminished size with distance from ownship played a role in change detection response time—pilots were slower (particularly in detecting traffic aircraft changes) with the split-screen compared to the 2D coplanar IHD. These effects will be discussed within the context of visual scanning measures.


2010 ◽  
Vol 50 (20) ◽  
pp. 2062-2068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eckart Zimmermann ◽  
Fabian Schnier ◽  
Markus Lappe

Author(s):  
Viet T. Vu ◽  
Mats I. Pettersson ◽  
Bruna G. Palm ◽  
Dimas I. Alves ◽  
Natanael R. Gomes

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document