Cognitive control refers to maintaining information such as goals, instructions, or plans for short periods of time, and using this information to appropriately guide behavior. Alzheimer?s Disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease, associated with increased accumulation of proteins amyloid beta and tau in the brain and behavioral changes to domains including memory and cognitive control. Although a small proportion of AD patients experience onset at an early age, the prevalence of AD increases with older age and is most common in older adults. Another condition common in older adulthood is age-related hearing loss, present in upwards of 50% of adults over the age of 70. In the current proposal we seek to understand the relationship of hearing, cognition, and the brain in older adults with wand without AD. We will test hearing sensitivity, as well as speech perception in noise using words whose linguistic properties make them easier or harder to understand (based on the number of similar-sounding words), with the harder words placing increased demands on cognitive control systems. We thus expect patients with symptomatic AD, who have diminished cognitive control, to perform more poorly. In addition, we will investigate the degree to which individual differences in cognitive ability and brain health (cortical thickness, resting state fMRI, and PET- identified tau depositions) relate to hearing, testing the hypothesis that hearing loss may be associated with decreased cortical function in adults with symptomatic AD.
As we age, we face changing auditory and cognitive abilities that can challenge many aspects of functioning, notably including spoken communication. In the current project we use behavioral, neuroimaging, and clinical approaches to investigate the link between hearing and cognition in patients with Alzheimer?s Disease. The results will help us better understand difficulties with communication in healthy aging and Alzheimer?s Disease, and identify targets for intervention to improve performance.
| Peelle, Jonathan E (2018) Listening Effort: How the Cognitive Consequences of Acoustic Challenge Are Reflected in Brain and Behavior. Ear Hear 39:204-214 |
| Koeritzer, Margaret A; Rogers, Chad S; Van Engen, Kristin J et al. (2018) The Impact of Age, Background Noise, Semantic Ambiguity, and Hearing Loss on Recognition Memory for Spoken Sentences. J Speech Lang Hear Res 61:740-751 |
| Peelle, Jonathan E (2017) Optical neuroimaging of spoken language. Lang Cogn Neurosci 32:847-854 |
| Peelle, Jonathan E; Wingfield, Arthur (2016) The Neural Consequences of Age-Related Hearing Loss. Trends Neurosci 39:486-497 |
