Age and hearing loss damage TFS but spare envelope cue processing

Evidence

The monaural and binaural processing of TFS is adversely affected by both increasing age and cochlear hearing loss. The efficiency of processing monaural ENV information may be adversely affected by increasing age, but the temporal resolution of ENV cues appears to be unaffected. The processing of binaural ENV information is adversely affected by increasing age. Cochlear hearing loss does not markedly affect the processing of monaural or binaural ENV information. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 824 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Füllgrabe et al. ( 2015 ) eliminated confounding effects of hearing loss by testing young (18–27 years) and older (60–79 years) subjects with matched audiograms. Both groups had audiometric thresholds ≤ 20 dB HL from 0.125 to 6 kHz. The TFS1 test was conducted using centre frequencies of 1 and 2 kHz. The older subjects performed significantly more poorly than the young subjects for both centre frequencies. Performance on the TFS1 task was not correlated with audiometric thresholds at the test frequencies. These results confirm that increased age is associated with a poorer ability to use monaural TFS cues, in the absence of any abnormality in the audiogram. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 793 (#expands, via linked claim)

Although the results of Hawkins and Wightman ( 1980 ), described in Sect. 3.3 , suggested that hearing loss adversely affected the discrimination of ITD carried in ENVp , King et al. ( 2014 ) found that thresholds for detecting IPDs in ENVp were not significantly correlated with absolute thresholds. Also, Léger et al. ( 2015 ) reported that thresholds for detecting IPDs in ENVp were similar for subjects with normal and impaired hearing (both groups had a wide range of ages). Overall, the results suggest that hearing loss does not markedly affect the ability to process binaural ENV cues. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 822 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Noise exposure and age produce distinct hearing-loss signatures; Monaural temporal fine structure processing declines with age even without hearing loss. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 824; Temporal-structure sensitivity declines with age even when audiograms remain normal. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 793 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Monaural temporal fine structure processing declines with age even without hearing loss. #corroborates (0.82) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 824
• Temporal-structure sensitivity declines with age even when audiograms remain normal. #expands (0.80) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 793
• Cochlear hearing loss spares the binaural processing of envelope cues #corroborates (0.78) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 822
• Noise exposure and age produce distinct hearing-loss signatures #corroborates (0.75)