Older Listeners Research Articles

Clinical Manifestations.

Despite considerable interest in music as an index of brain function and a therapeutic modality in dementia, the neural correlates of music processing in different dementias remain poorly defined. In the frontotemporal dementia spectrum, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) are often associated with striking changes in musical function and/or retained musical skills, suggesting frontotemporal dementia may be an instructive disease model in which to assess brain mechanisms of music processing in neurodegenerative pathologies. Here we addressed this issue using activation fMRI in patients with frontotemporal dementia. Nineteen patients (10 svPPA, nine bvFTD) and 26 healthy age-matched controls underwent 3-Tesla 'sparse' fMRI in which they listened passively to musical melodies. In a 2×2 factorial design, stimulus conditions were manipulated to probe two key dimensions of music processing: semantic memory (familiarity: familiar vs. novel melodies) and perceptual features (temporal structure: isochronous vs. anisochronous melodies). Post-scan behavioral testing assessed participants' ability to discriminate melodies under each of the two manipulated stimulus dimensions. Information about participant demographics and musical background was also collected. The healthy older control group showed separable profiles of activation in posterior superior temporal cortex for processing musical temporal structure, and in anterior temporal and inferior frontal cortices for processing musical familiarity. Compared with healthy older listeners, syndromic groups showed differential patterns of engagement of these distributed neural networks. In post-scan behavioral testing, patients with bvFTD also exhibited significantly impaired musical familiarity judgments relative to healthy controls. Frontotemporal dementia syndromes show distinct functional neuroanatomical signatures of music perception. Future work should explore fMRI of music processing as a probe of neural function in particular molecular pathologies and a candidate marker of therapeutic potential in dementia.

Recognition of Speech With Dynamic Pitch Manipulation in Noise: Effects of Manipulation Methods.

Dynamic pitch, which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation method on speech recognition in noise by younger and older adults. Speech recognition accuracy in noise was measured from younger adults with normal hearing in Experiment 1, and speech reception threshold (in dB SNR) from older adults with normal hearing to mild-moderate hearing loss in Experiment 2. The dynamic pitch contours of the speech stimuli were manipulated using both symmetrical and asymmetrical methods. Younger adults recognized speech better in noise with asymmetrical than symmetrical manipulation, and with weakened than strengthened dynamic pitch. A substantial amount of variability was observed in a group of older listeners. This variability was predominately predicted by the listeners' age but not hearing thresholds or their ability to perceive dynamic pitch in fluctuating noise. The asymmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch had a less negative effect than the symmetrical manipulation. This effect also interacted with pitch-change direction. These findings suggest the influence of perceptual naturalness on speech recognition with signal modification. Directions for future research are also discussed.

Cochlear-Implant Simulated Signal Degradation Exacerbates Listening Effort in Older Listeners.

Individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) often report that listening requires high levels of effort. Listening effort can increase with decreasing spectral resolution, which occurs when listening with a CI, and can also increase with age. What is not clear is whether these factors interact; older CI listeners potentially experience even higher listening effort with greater signal degradation than younger CI listeners. This study used pupillometry as a physiological index of listening effort to examine whether age, spectral resolution, and their interaction affect listening effort in a simulation of CI listening. Fifteen younger normal-hearing listeners (ages 18 to 31 years) and 15 older normal-hearing listeners (ages 65 to 75 years) participated in this experiment; they had normal hearing thresholds from 0.25 to 4 kHz. Participants repeated sentences presented in quiet that were either unprocessed or vocoded, simulating CI listening. Stimuli frequency spectra were limited to below 4 kHz (to control for effects of age-related high-frequency hearing loss), and spectral resolution was decreased by decreasing the number of vocoder channels, with 32-, 16-, and 8-channel conditions. Behavioral speech recognition scores and pupil dilation were recorded during this task. In addition, cognitive measures of working memory and processing speed were obtained to examine if individual differences in these measures predicted changes in pupil dilation. For trials where the sentence was recalled correctly, there was a significant interaction between age and spectral resolution, with significantly greater pupil dilation in the older normal-hearing listeners for the 8- and 32-channel vocoded conditions. Cognitive measures did not predict pupil dilation. There was a significant interaction between age and spectral resolution, such that older listeners appear to exert relatively higher listening effort than younger listeners when the signal is highly degraded, with the largest effects observed in the eight-channel condition. The clinical implication is that older listeners may be at higher risk for increased listening effort with a CI.

Perceptual and neural measures of spectral and temporal cue strength in speech perception

Many listeners experience difficulty understanding speech in noise that may result from limited ability to use important acoustic cues, such as spectral and temporal features. One way of assessing deficits related to perceptual or neural processing is to enhance or degrade specific cues and measure the impact on behavior or neural coding. To do so, we combined a target-word identification task with simultaneous EEG measurement in 20 young and 20 older normal-hearing listeners. Coordinate Response Measure sentences were manipulated in the spectral modulation (SM) and temporal modulation (TM) domains (neutral, degraded, enhanced) and presented in four-talker babble in both passive and attention conditions. Multivariate temporal response function (mTRF) analyses were used to evaluate cortical tracking of the speech envelope. Speech perception in younger listeners improved for both SM and TM enhancement, but older listeners only benefited from TM enhancement. Both groups showed stronger cortical tracking for attention versus passive listening, but only older listeners showed tracking changes across SM and TM conditions. Cortical tracking and perceptual results in older listeners are consistent with cognitive aging theories suggesting that cortical processing changes with age involve both compensation and dedifferentiation to help maintain auditory perceptual performance.

Allocation of cognitive resources for older adults with normal or impaired hearing when listening to temporally degraded and masked speech

Hearing impairment may affect how older listeners allocate cognitive resources when communicating in challenging environments. Older adults with normal or impaired hearing completed three speech recognition studies. The studies consisted of 15-16 measures of temporally filtered speech with (1) degraded spectral cues, (2) competing speech-modulated noise, and (3) speech vocoding in speech-modulated noise. Generalization was assessed with measures of speech interruption, segregation, and multitalker masking. To account for audibility differences, all listeners received spectral shaping fit to their hearing thresholds. Measures in each study were reduced to a single principal component (PC) that represented speech recognition abilities. Participants also completed a cognitive test battery that yielded domain-specific PCs and a measure of speech glimpsing. For each study, hierarchical linear regression analysis was completed separately for subgroups of older adults with normal or impaired hearing using cognitive PCs as predictor variables, followed by speech glimpsing, age, and hearing thresholds. Vocabulary knowledge was the best predictor of speech recognition for older adults with normal hearing, whereas working memory consistently explained ∼30%-40% of the variance in recognition for older adults with hearing loss. Thus, even with sufficient audibility, hearing impairment may alter allocation of cognitive resources for older adults listening to degraded speech.

Visual speech benefit provided by realistic sentences in noise

Understanding speech in background noise presents a significant challenge to listeners with hearing loss. Even though hearing aids are very successful in restoring listening in quieter conditions, current devices provide only limited benefit in noise. While seeing a talker can improve intelligibility, visual benefit has typically been quantified using rather unrealistic audio-visual speech materials. Here, we investigated visual benefit using realistic effortful speech from the ECO-SiN corpus. Audio-only, audio-visual, and visual-only sentences were presented in three simulated real-world environments at their realistic sound levels in a 3-D loudspeaker array equipped with integrated high-resolution video projectors. Ten young normal-hearing (NH) listeners as well as 18 older listeners with sensorineural hearing loss participated in the experiment with and without their own hearing aids. While the NH listeners rapidly hit ceiling, listeners with hearing loss struggled to understand the audio-only sentences in the louder background noise—even when aided. There was, however, demonstrable visual benefit of up to 16% in the audio-visual condition for both groups, which is significantly less than commonly reported. Future research will explore if the individual outcomes of the audio-visual ECO-SIN test better reflects real-world hearing experience and how far this is maintained when using virtual reality glasses.

The effect of motor resource suppression on speech perception in noise in younger and older listeners: An online study.

Speech motor resources may be recruited to assist challenging speech perception in younger normally hearing listeners, but the extent to which this occurs for older adult listeners is unclear. We investigated if speech motor resources are also recruited in older adults during speech perception. Specifically, we investigated if suppression of speech motor resources via sub-vocal rehearsal affects speech perception compared to non-speech motor suppression (jaw movement) and passive listening. Participants identified words in speech-shaped noise at signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) from -16 to +16 dB in three listening conditions during which participants: (1) opened and closed their jaw (non-speech movement); (2) sub-vocally mimed 'the' (articulatory suppression); (3) produced no concurrent movement (passive listening). Data from 46 younger adults (M age = 20.17 years, SD = 1.61, 36 female) and 41 older adults (M age = 69 years, SD = 5.82, 21 female) were analysed. Linear mixed effects modelling investigated the impact of age, listening condition, and self-reported hearing ability on speech perception (d' prime). Results indicated that speech perception ability was significantly worse in older adults relative to younger adults across all listening conditions. A significant interaction between age group and listening condition indicated that younger adults showed poorer performance during articulatory suppression compared to passive listening, but older adults performed equivalently across conditions. This finding suggests that speech motor resources are less available to support speech perception in older adults, providing important insights for auditory-motor integration for speech understanding and communication in ageing.

The effect of rhythm on selective listening in multiple-source environments for young and older adults

Understanding continuous speech with competing background sounds is challenging, particularly for older adults. One stimulus property that may aid listeners understanding of to-be-attended (target) material is temporal regularity (rhythm). In the context of speech-in-noise understanding, McAuley and colleagues recently showed a target rhythm effect whereby recognition of target speech was better when natural speech rhythm of a target talker was intact than when it was temporally altered. The current study replicates the target rhythm effect using a synthetic vowel sequence paradigm in young adults (Experiment 1) and then uses this paradigm to investigate potential age-related changes in the effect of rhythm on recognition (Experiment 2). Listeners identified the last three vowels of temporally regular (isochronous) and irregular (anisochronous) synthetic vowel sequences in quiet and with a competing background sequence of vowel-like harmonic tone complexes presented at various tempos. The results replicated the target rhythm effect whereby temporal regularity in the vowel sequences improved identification accuracy of young listeners compared to irregular vowel sequences. The magnitude of the effect was not found to be influenced by background tempo, but faster background tempos led to greater vowel identification accuracy independent of regularity. Older listeners also demonstrated a target rhythm effect but received less benefit from the temporal regularity of the target sequences than did young listeners. This study highlights the importance of rhythm for understanding age-related differences in selective listening in complex environments and provides a novel paradigm for investigating effects of rhythm on perception.

Differential sensitivity to speech rhythms in young and older adults.

Sensitivity to the temporal properties of auditory patterns tends to be poorer in older listeners, and this has been hypothesized to be one factor contributing to their poorer speech understanding. This study examined sensitivity to speech rhythms in young and older normal-hearing subjects, using a task designed to measure the effect of speech rhythmic context on the detection of changes in the timing of word onsets in spoken sentences. A temporal-shift detection paradigm was used in which listeners were presented with an intact sentence followed by two versions of the sentence in which a portion of speech was replaced with a silent gap: one with correct gap timing (the same duration as the missing speech) and one with altered gap timing (shorter or longer than the duration of the missing speech), resulting in an early or late resumption of the sentence after the gap. The sentences were presented with either an intact rhythm or an altered rhythm preceding the silent gap. Listeners judged which sentence had the altered gap timing, and thresholds for the detection of deviations from the correct timing were calculated separately for shortened and lengthened gaps. Both young and older listeners demonstrated lower thresholds in the intact rhythm condition than in the altered rhythm conditions. However, shortened gaps led to lower thresholds than lengthened gaps for the young listeners, while older listeners were not sensitive to the direction of the change in timing. These results show that both young and older listeners rely on speech rhythms to generate temporal expectancies for upcoming speech events. However, the absence of lower thresholds for shortened gaps among the older listeners indicates a change in speech-timing expectancies with age. A further examination of individual differences within the older group revealed that those with better rhythm-discrimination abilities (from a separate study) tended to show the same heightened sensitivity to early events observed with the young listeners.

Performance Monitoring and Cognitive Inhibition during a Speech-in-Noise Task in Older Listeners.

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of hearing loss on theta and alpha electroencephalography (EEG) frequency power measures of performance monitoring and cognitive inhibition, respectively, during a speech-in-noise task. It was hypothesized that hearing loss would be associated with an increase in the peak power of theta and alpha frequencies toward easier conditions compared to normal hearing adults. The shift would reflect how hearing loss modulates the recruitment of listening effort to easier listening conditions. Nine older adults with normal hearing (ONH) and 10 older adults with hearing loss (OHL) participated in this study. EEG data were collected from all participants while they completed the words-in-noise task. It hypothesized that hearing loss would also have an effect on theta and alpha power. The ONH group showed an inverted U -shape effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but there were limited effects of SNR on theta or alpha power in the OHL group. The results of the ONH group support the growing body of literature showing effects of listening conditions on alpha and theta power. The null results of listening condition in the OHL group add to a smaller body of literature, suggesting that listening effort research conditions should have near ceiling performance.

Auditory environment diversity quantified using entropy from real-world hearing aid data.

Using data collected from hearing aid users' own hearing aids could improve the customization of hearing aid processing for different users based on the auditory environments they encounter in daily life. Prior studies characterizing hearing aid users' auditory environments have focused on mean sound pressure levels and proportions of environments based on classifications. In this study, we extend these approaches by introducing entropy to quantify the diversity of auditory environments hearing aid users encounter. Participants from 4 groups (younger listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing loss from an urban or rural area) wore research hearing aids and completed ecological momentary assessments on a smartphone for 1 week. The smartphone was programmed to sample the processing state (input sound pressure level and environment classification) of the hearing aids every 10 min and deliver an ecological momentary assessment every 40 min. Entropy values for sound pressure levels, environment classifications, and ecological momentary assessment responses were calculated for each participant to quantify the diversity of auditory environments encountered over the course of the week. Entropy values between groups were compared. Group differences in entropy were compared to prior work reporting differences in mean sound pressure levels and proportions of environment classifications. Group differences in entropy measured objectively from the hearing aid data were also compared to differences in entropy measured from the self-report ecological momentary assessment data. Auditory environment diversity, quantified using entropy from the hearing aid data, was significantly higher for younger listeners than older listeners. Entropy measured using ecological momentary assessment was also significantly higher for younger listeners than older listeners. Using entropy, we show that younger listeners experience a greater diversity of auditory environments than older listeners. Alignment of group entropy differences with differences in sound pressure levels and hearing aid feature activation previously reported, along with alignment with ecological momentary response entropy, suggests that entropy is a valid and useful metric. We conclude that entropy is a simple and intuitive way to measure auditory environment diversity using hearing aid data.

Age-related reduction of amplitude modulation frequency selectivity.

The perception of amplitude modulations (AMs) has been characterized by a frequency-selective process in the temporal envelope domain and simulated in computational auditory processing and perception models using a modulation filterbank. Such AM frequency-selective processing has been argued to be critical for the perception of complex sounds, including speech. This study aimed at investigating the effects of age on behavioral AM frequency selectivity in young (n = 11, 22-29 years) versus older (n = 10, 57-77 years) listeners with normal hearing, using a simultaneous AM masking paradigm with a sinusoidal carrier (2.8 kHz), target modulation frequencies of 4, 16, 64, and 128 Hz, and narrowband-noise modulation maskers. A reduction of AM frequency selectivity by a factor of up to 2 was found in the older listeners. While the observed AM selectivity co-varied with the unmasked AM detection sensitivity, the age-related broadening of the masked threshold patterns remained stable even when AM sensitivity was similar across groups for an extended stimulus duration. The results from the present study might provide a valuable basis for further investigations exploring the effects of age and reduced AM frequency selectivity on complex sound perception as well as the interaction of age and hearing impairment on AM processing and perception.

Inherent envelope fluctuations in forward masking: Effects of age and hearing loss.

Forward masking is generally greater for Gaussian noise (GN) than for low-fluctuation noise maskers, i.e., GN disruption. Because the minimal hearing loss that is associated with older age may affect GN disruption differently than more significant hearing loss, the current study explored the contribution of minimal hearing loss associated with older age to GN disruption. GN disruption was measured using three masker-signal delays (25, 75, and 150 ms) for three adult groups: younger participants with normal hearing (NH), older participants with minimal hearing loss, and older participants with sensorineural hearing loss. The role of underlying mechanisms was tested using a computational model for midbrain neurons. The primary result suggests that older listeners with mild threshold elevations that typically occur with age may be more susceptible to the deleterious effects of masker envelope fluctuations than younger listeners with NH. Results from the computational model indicate that there may be a larger influence of efferent feedback and saturation of inner hair cells on forward masking and GN disruption than previously considered.

Age-related rollover for spectrally degraded temporal speech contrasts

Some speech sounds, or phonemes, are primarily distinguished acoustically from other phonemes by temporal cues. A decline in temporal-processing abilities is a common consequence of aging that might cause a listener to have difficulty differentiating between sounds, especially when the speech is degraded. One type of signal degradation occurs in a cochlear-implant vocoder simulation, which eliminates most of the spectral information in speech while maintaining the temporal envelope. In addition, temporal processing abilities may be challenged at higher presentation levels causing a decrease in performance (i.e., rollover), particularly in older listeners. This study measures the phoneme classification of younger and older listeners of four spectro-temporal contrasts when presented in quiet with and without vocoding at a range of presentation levels. We hypothesized that, due to declines in temporal processing abilities, older listeners would be more susceptible to rollover, measured by a decrease in phoneme classification performance for degraded temporal contrasts as presentation levels increase. We further hypothesized that performance rollover would occur more often for vocoded speech than for unprocessed speech, especially in older listeners. Preliminary data show interactions between speech contrasts, presentation levels, and vocoding. Our results will help facilitate understanding speech perception difficulties in older cochlear-implant users.

Psychophysical performance differences associated with auditory spatial attention in older listeners with and without hearing loss

In a busy listening environment with multiple speakers, even normal-hearing listeners may face difficulties in understanding speech (i.e., “the cocktail party problem”). Individual factors related to bottom-up and/or top-down processing difficulties may be associated with the listener’s ability to attend to speech, a key component in navigating complex acoustic environments. The present study tested listeners on a battery of psychophysical measures and compared listener performance to cortical measures (EEG) of spatial-change tuning and auditory spatial attention. The behavioral tests measured both perceptual and cognitive performance and included: frequency modulation detection, spectro-temporal modulation sensitivity, spatial release from masking, temporal gap detection, auditory and non-auditorysustained attention, and visuo-spatial problem solving. The EEG paradigm tested the listener’s ability to attend to moving speech in quiet or background babble in the free field. Older listeners with and without hearing loss (n = 20 per group) demonstrated wide individual performance for some measures and significant correlations between behavioral thresholds and cortical responses, consistent with a more refined view of age-related hearing loss and a need for a more holistic approach in diagnoses for individuals beyond standard clinical tests. [Work supported by NIH R21DC017832.]

Effects of age and hearing loss on talker identification and talker change detection

While the detrimental effects of age and hearing loss on word recognition and speech comprehension are well-established, surprisingly little is known about how these factors affect the ability to extract talker-related information from speech. Here, we describe two studies that used different behavioral tasks to address this question. In the first study (Talker Identification), listeners were trained to identify talkers by the sound of their voice, and then tested on their ability to identify those talkers in quiet or in the presence of background noise or competing speech. In the second study (Talker Change Detection), explicit talker identification was not required, but instead listeners detected if a change in talker had occurred within a sequence of words. In both studies, listeners were recruited in four groups to include younger/older ages and normal/impaired hearing. In both studies, we found that age and hearing loss had independent effects on performance. We argue that a reduced ability to make use of talker-related information in speech may contribute to the difficulty encountered by older listeners and listeners with hearing loss, when communicating in group situations.

Revisiting listener evaluations of creaky voice

In U.S. English, nonpathological creaky voice is a common and natural voice quality that contributes meaningful linguistic information. However, it is also a target of gender-based prejudice, with studies suggesting that speakers with creak sound less hirable and less pleasant. Unfortunately, the stimuli in these studies were often problematic (e.g., creak present in both creaky and modal stimuli; unusually high proportions of creak). To address these problems, we carefully selected naturallyproduced, low predictability sentences. Half of these contained creak on the final word (a common location for creak in both men and women speakers) and half did not. Listeners rated half of the sentences on a hirability scale and half on a pleasantness scale. They then completed an implicit association task regarding gender and career roles. Consistent with previous research, sentences with creak were rated as being produced by speakers who were less hirable than those without creak. Similar to previous findings, older listeners rated stimuli with creak as less pleasant than stimuli without creak. Implicit association scores did not predict ratings on either rating scale. Contrary to our expectations, less favorable evaluations of creak were found despite using naturallyproduced sentences with only sentence-final creak.

Speech recognition in echoic environments and the effect of aging and hearing impairment

Temporal modulations provide critical cues for speech recognition. When the temporal modulations are distorted by, e.g., reverberations, speech intelligibility drops, and the drop in speech intelligibility can be explained by the amount of distortions to the speech modulation spectrum, i.e., the spectrum of temporal modulations. Here, we test a condition in which speech is contaminated by a single echo. Speech is delayed by either 0.125 s or 0.25 s to create an echo, and these two conditions notch out the temporal modulations at 2 or 4 Hz, respectively. We evaluate how well young and older listeners can recognize such echoic speech. For young listeners, the speech recognition rate is not influenced by the echo, even when they are exposed to the first echoic sentence. For older listeners, the speech recognition rate drops to less than 60% when listening to the first echoic sentence, but rapidly recovers to above 75% with exposure to a few sentences. Further analyses reveal that both age and the hearing threshold influence the recognition of echoic speech for the older listeners. These results show that the recognition of echoic speech cannot be fully explained by distortions to the modulation spectrum, and suggest that the auditory system has mechanisms to effectively compensate the influence of single echoes.

Cortical-brainstem interplay during speech perception in older adults with and without hearing loss.

Real time modulation of brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) by online changes in cortical arousal state via the corticofugal (top-down) pathway has been demonstrated previously in young adults and is more prominent in the presence of background noise. FFRs during high cortical arousal states also have a stronger relationship with speech perception. Aging is associated with increased auditory brain responses, which might reflect degraded inhibitory processing within the peripheral and ascending pathways, or changes in attentional control regulation via descending auditory pathways. Here, we tested the hypothesis that online corticofugal interplay is impacted by age-related hearing loss. We measured EEG in older adults with normal-hearing (NH) and mild to moderate hearing-loss (HL) while they performed speech identification tasks in different noise backgrounds. We measured α power to index online cortical arousal states during task engagement. Subsequently, we split brainstem speech-FFRs, on a trial-by-trial basis, according to fluctuations in concomitant cortical α power into low or high α FFRs to index cortical-brainstem modulation. We found cortical α power was smaller in the HL than the NH group. In NH listeners, α-FFRs modulation for clear speech (i.e., without noise) also resembled that previously observed in younger adults for speech in noise. Cortical-brainstem modulation was further diminished in HL older adults in the clear condition and by noise in NH older adults. Machine learning classification showed low α FFR frequency spectra yielded higher accuracy for classifying listeners' perceptual performance in both NH and HL participants. Moreover, low α FFRs decreased with increased hearing thresholds at 0.5-2 kHz for clear speech but noise generally reduced low α FFRs in the HL group. Collectively, our study reveals cortical arousal state actively shapes brainstem speech representations and provides a potential new mechanism for older listeners' difficulties perceiving speech in cocktail party-like listening situations in the form of a miss-coordination between cortical and subcortical levels of auditory processing.

Using the Moodle platform to teach digital technologies to learners of the university of the third age

In 2011, social and pedagogical service University of the Third Age was introduced in Ukraine in territorial social service centers (provision of social services). Faculties of digital technologies are designed to form and develop digital literacy and digital competences of older students in order to overcome digital divides. The objective of this article is to outline the prospects of digital education aimed at increasing the level of digital literacy of learners of the University of the Third Age, taking into account the trend of using in geragogic practice the digital educational environment of the Moodle platform. The organization of the distance education system at the University of the Third Age in the territorial centers of social service (provision of social services) is currently carried out mainly on the basis of the Moodle platform. Distance education now has everything it takes to use geragogic technologies in the classroom. One of the effective geragogic educational technologies is the tutoring of older listeners. Thus, for the success of distance learning of digital competences of university students of the third age of the territorial social service center using the Moodle platform, it is necessary to introduce tutor support and develop an informational and educational Internet environment. The assessment of the effectiveness of the activity of the social worker-tutor takes place through the assessment of the level of digital social adaptability of the learners of the University of the Third Age of the territorial social service center. The advantages of using the Moodle platform for teaching students of the University of the Third Age have been established. It is concluded that distance learning through the Moodle platform has good prospects for older learners, related to the implementation of lifelong learning.