Abstract
BackgroundA large group of young children are exposed to repetitive middle ear infections but the effects of the fluctuating hearing sensations on immature central auditory system are not fully understood. The present study investigated the consequences of early childhood recurrent acute otitis media (RAOM) on involuntary auditory attention switching.MethodsBy utilizing auditory event-related potentials, neural mechanisms of involuntary attention were studied in 22–26 month-old children (N = 18) who had had an early childhood RAOM and healthy controls (N = 19). The earlier and later phase of the P3a (eP3a and lP3a) and the late negativity (LN) were measured for embedded novel sounds in the passive multi-feature paradigm with repeating standard and deviant syllable stimuli. The children with RAOM had tympanostomy tubes inserted and all the children in both study groups had to have clinically healthy ears at the time of the measurement assessed by an otolaryngologist.ResultsThe results showed that lP3a amplitude diminished less from frontal to central and parietal areas in the children with RAOM than the controls. This might reflect an immature control of involuntary attention switch. Furthermore, the LN latency was longer in children with RAOM than in the controls, which suggests delayed reorientation of attention in RAOM.ConclusionsThe lP3a and LN responses are affected in toddlers who have had a RAOM even when their ears are healthy. This suggests detrimental long-term effects of RAOM on the neural mechanisms of involuntary attention.
Highlights
A large group of young children are exposed to repetitive middle ear infections but the effects of the fluctuating hearing sensations on immature central auditory system are not fully understood
Standard deviations are in parentheses A significant group difference is italized RAOM recurrent acute otitis media and control groups, respectively)
This study examined the effects of early childhood RAOM on neural mechanisms of involuntary attention at the age of 2 years
Summary
A large group of young children are exposed to repetitive middle ear infections but the effects of the fluctuating hearing sensations on immature central auditory system are not fully understood. The present study inves‐ tigated the consequences of early childhood recurrent acute otitis media (RAOM) on involuntary auditory attention switching. About 30 % of children have recurrent middle ear infections (recurrent acute otitis media, RAOM) in their early childhood [1, 2]. Involuntary orientation to environmental events as well as selective maintenance of attention is essential for speech processing and language learning. Involuntary attention accounts for the detection and selection of potentially biologically meaningful information of events unrelated to the ongoing task [19]. Involuntary attention is a bottom-up (stimulus-driven) process [19] but during maturation the developing top-down mechanisms start to inhibit distractors which are not meaningful, in other words, children learn to separate relevant from irrelevant stimuli [20, 21]. An excessive tendency to orient to the irrelevant stimuli requiring a lot of attentional resources makes goal-directed behavior harder [22]
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