The long-term goals of the proposed research are to examine the effect of advancing age on auditory learning, and to identify the intracerebral sources underlying behaviorally measured gains in skills acquired with training. More specifically, using behavioral and physiological measures, we will characterize the effects of age on the acquisition, generalization, and retention of learned temporal cues. Motivation for this study stems from the fact that older adults, with and without hearing loss, have difficulty perceiving various types of time-varying acoustic cues. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that impaired perception results, in part, from age-related factors affecting neural synchrony. Over the past decade we, and others, have shown that auditory training can alter synchronous neural patterns and improve the perception of the trained temporal cue. However, much of what we know about auditory training and auditory plasticity is limited to young adults and animals. Because the largest proportion of the population with communication disorders is elderly, it is important to determine if older adults can benefit from auditory training, or, if age limits the capacity for neural and perceptual change.
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