Abstract
The purpose of this study was to assess the temporal processing and speech perception abilities in older adults who were practicing meditation for more than five years. Participants were comprised of three groups, 30 young adults (“YA”) in the age range of 20–30 years, 30 older adults in the age range of 50–65 years who practiced meditation for a period of five years or more (effective meditators “EM”), and 51 age matched older adults who did not have any experience of meditation (non-meditators “NM”). Temporal processing was evaluated using gap detection in noise, duration discrimination, modulation detection, and backward masking and duration pattern tests. Speech perception was measured in presence of a four-talker babble at −5 dB signal to noise ratio and with the vocoded stimuli. Results revealed that EM group performed significantly better than NM group in all psychophysical and speech perception tasks except in gap detection task. In the gap detection task, two groups did not differ significantly. Furthermore, EM group showed significantly better modulation detection thresholds compared to YA. Results of the study demonstrate that the practice of meditation not only offsets the decline in temporal and speech processing abilities due to aging process but also improves the ability to perceive the modulations compared to young adults.
Highlights
Auditory temporal processing is the perception of sound or of the alteration of sound within a restricted or defined time domain [1]
The participants were comprised of three groups, 30 young adults in the age range of 20–30 years, 30 older adults in the age range of 50–65 years who practiced meditation for a period of five years or more (hereafter called “EM”), and 51 age matched older adults who did not have any experience of meditation (hear after called “NM”)
(a) young adults (YA) group performed significantly better than NM group on all the temporal processing tests
Summary
Auditory temporal processing is the perception of sound or of the alteration of sound within a restricted or defined time domain [1]. Speech stimuli and other background sounds are dynamic in terms of both amplitude and frequency Perception of this variation in amplitude and frequency is crucial to understand speech in quiet and more so in background noise [2]. Evidence for deterioration of temporal processing with age predominantly comes from studies on gap detection. Investigators have shown increased gap detection thresholds in elderly population [4,5,6,7]. Some investigators have used simple tonal or noise signals and reported age-related difficulties in detection of gap [6, 8], whereas others have used more complex stimuli or increased task demands and shown more pronounced differences between younger and older listeners [9]. Older individuals are shown to have difficulties with auditory sequencing tasks that require discrimination or recognition of temporal order of the stimulus within a serial pattern [10,11,12,13]
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