Working memory compensates for degraded internal speech representations in aging.

Evidence

The new data presented here suggest that WMC becomes more important with age, especially in the oldest participants. One possible explanation for this increasing cognitive involvement with age could be the accumulation of age-related deficits in liminary but also supraliminary auditory processing (e.g. sensitivity to temporal-fine-structure and temporal-envelope cues; Füllgrabe 2013 ; Füllgrabe et al. 2015 ), resulting in under-defined and degraded internal representations of the speech signal, calling for WM-based compensatory mechanisms to aid identification and comprehension. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1155

Categorization

• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1155
• XREF: connects to: Working memory correlates with speech-in-noise performance only in middle-aged and older normal-hearing listeners — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1120; Task difficulty alone does not explain why older listeners show the working-memory effect.; Young chimpanzees outperform adult chimps on working memory tasks. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 92