Critical listening ability declines with age even for experts
Evidence
I retired from the listening panel. Figure 3.6a shows my hearing performance, which could have been worse, but the hearing threshold is a crude metric, ignoring much. Now I enjoy music and movies. I still have opinions, but they are my own. It was a bitter pill. Critical listening is a young person’s game, but then only if the young person has functioning ears. — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1802
Categorization
- XREF: Illustrates the book’s running theme that hearing threshold is a crude metric — directly instantiating Section 3.2’s point about ‘normal’ hearing hiding degraded performance. — connects to: Aging degrades listening judgment reliability despite accumulated expertise.; Age and accumulated noise exposure degrade even expert listening panel reliability; Both working memory and speech-in-noise ability decline with age. (+4 more)
Related
- Aging degrades listening judgment reliability despite accumulated expertise. (similarity 0.95)
- Age and accumulated noise exposure degrade even expert listening panel reliability (similarity 0.91)
- Both working memory and speech-in-noise ability decline with age. (similarity 0.91)
- Listener judgment reliability declines with age and accumulated noise exposure (similarity 0.88)
- Age-related hearing decline in noise begins while thresholds remain normal (similarity 0.85)
- Temporal-structure sensitivity declines with age even when audiograms remain normal. (similarity 0.83)
- Hearing sensitivity degrades with age and is lower in early childhood (similarity 0.83)
- Hearing sensitivity within clinically normal range still declines measurably with age (similarity 0.82)
- Age-related temporal and level sensitivity decline precedes measurable hearing loss (similarity 0.82)
- Early-elderly listeners show temporal sensitivity decline before audiometric loss appears. (similarity 0.82)
- Hearing loss makes listener opinions unreliable no matter how experienced (similarity 0.81)
- Frequency selectivity, not temporal processing, drives age-related declines in Huggins-pitch thresholds. (similarity 0.81)
- Aging degrades envelope-based binaural phase discrimination independent of hearing loss (similarity 0.80)
- Age-related hearing decline begins even with clinically normal pure-tone audiograms (similarity 0.80)
- Hearing thresholds add almost no predictive power beyond age and encoding measures (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Monaural temporal fine structure processing declines with age even without hearing loss.
#corroborates(0.85) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 824 - Hearing loss makes listener opinions unreliable no matter how experienced
#qualifies(0.80) - Temporal-structure sensitivity declines with age even when audiograms remain normal.
#complicates(0.75) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 793 - Hearing sensitivity degrades with age and is lower in early childhood
#complicates(0.72)