Abstract
Proactive interference (PI) is the capacity to resist interference to the acquisition of new memories from information stored in the long-term memory. Previous research has shown that PI correlates significantly with the speech-in-noise recognition scores of younger adults with normal hearing. In this study, we report the results of an experiment designed to investigate the extent to which tests of visual PI relate to the speech-in-noise recognition scores of older adults with hearing loss, in aided and unaided conditions. The results suggest that measures of PI correlate significantly with speech-in-noise recognition only in the unaided condition. Furthermore the relation between PI and speech-in-noise recognition differs to that observed in younger listeners without hearing loss. The findings suggest that the relation between PI tests and the speech-in-noise recognition scores of older adults with hearing loss relates to capability of the test to index cognitive flexibility.
Highlights
Proactive interference (PI) refers to an effect whereby the acquisition of new memories is disrupted by interference from similar information that has been learned previously
The aim of the present study is to investigate whether the speech-in-noise recognition scores of listeners with an agerelated hearing loss is significantly related to performance in a visual PI test
The findings indicate that release from PI is significantly correlated with both aided and unaided speech-in-noise recognition in older listeners with hearing loss
Summary
Proactive interference (PI) refers to an effect whereby the acquisition of new memories is disrupted by interference from similar information that has been learned previously. The earliest studies of PI focussed only on investigating the capacity to resist PI by presenting lists of words to be recalled after a short interval of time This procedure is known as the Brown–Peterson paradigm (Brown, 1958; Peterson and Peterson, 1959) and has since been modified to allow for the examination of release from PI. This modified version of the Brown–Peterson task (Wickens et al, 1963; Wickens, 1970) is based on manipulating the semantic categories of the to-be-remembered word lists such that the first three lists belong to the same category (for example, countries) with the final list belonging to a different one (for example, flowers). Resistance to PI would be operationalised as the difference in performance (that is, number of words correctly recalled) between the three
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