Abstract
Along with established effects of age on hearing sensitivity, there is a growing body of evidence that the aging auditory system suffers from reduced temporal resolution as well. This, in combination with changes in attentional-resource allocation, could have profound effects on the ability for older listeners to selectively attend to spatial locations—a key component to successful listening and communication in challenging auditory environments. Because behavioral tasks rarely have an unattended comparison and electrophysiological tasks rarely have an attended comparison, it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which selective attention mediates or sharpens spatial tuning. To address this shortcoming, we measured cortical responses using electroencephalography for moving stimuli in the free field during both passive and active conditions. Active conditions required listeners to respond to the onset of a stimulus when it occurred at a specific location (either 30° to the left or right of center). Both younger and older normal-hearing listeners participated in the study. The event-related potentials as well as the source-localized activity in regions of interest associated with sensory processing (i.e., left and right auditory cortices) and top-down control (i.e., dorsal fronto-parietal areas) revealed considerable morphological differences between the age groups.
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