Effects of aging on signal in noise processing

噪声处理中老化对信号的影响

• 批准号: 10543497
• 负责人: Brian J. Malone
• 金额: $ 53.31万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-02-01 至 2025-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10543497
• 关键词: Acoustics; Address; Affect; Age; Age-associated memory impairment; Aging; Alzheimer' s Disease; Animals; Area; Attention; Attenuated; Auditory; Auditory area; Auditory system; Brain; Central Nervous System; Code; Cognitive deficits; Complex; Data; Depressed mood; Elderly; Environment; Equilibrium; Event; Female; Foundations; Geriatrics; Goals; Hearing; Hearing Aids; Human; Individual; Intervention; Investigation; Knowledge; Lateral; Lead; Measures; Medial; Mental Health; Mental disorders; Modeling; Monkeys; Nervous System; Neurons; Noise; Perception; Peripheral; Persons; Population; Presbycusis; Primates; Process; Property; Research; Rodent; Self-Help Devices; Sensory; Series; Signal Transduction; Social isolation; Source; Speech; Speech Perception; Stimulus; Text; Visual; age effect; age related; aged; attentional modulation; auditory pathway; auditory processing; auditory stimulus; comorbidity; directed attention; experimental study; hard of hearing; insight; juvenile animal; male; neural; neural correlate; nonhuman primate; normal hearing; programs; reconstitution; remediation; response; sound; suicidal

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Age-related hearing loss is a ubiquitous problem, estimated to affect up to one third of the population. This condition is much more detrimental than ‘hard of hearing’, rather, it has been implicated in a host of co-morbidities such as cognitive deficits, and other mental illness. It remains unclear if this is a cause and effect situation or an epiphenomenon. If the former, simple interventions may well lead to much better mental health among the elderly. The long-term goal of the proposed research program is to identify the neural coding principles that allow listeners to make sense of, and focus on, particular sounds (i.e. what you are listening to) when they occur mixed with other sounds (i.e. the background), something that is common in many listening situations. Although this is an extremely difficult computational problem, people with normal hearing solve it effortlessly. Unfortunately, this remarkable ability almost always declines with age, leaving individuals struggling to understand speech in noisy environments. In order to develop assistive technologies or therapies to restore this critical function, we need to understand how the brain processes sounds in complex acoustic scenes, and, in particular, exactly how it fails to do so in aged individuals. Age-related shifts in the coding strategy employed at different stages of the auditory pathway are believed to involve compensatory changes related to attenuated input from more peripheral stages, and recent research in older animals has demonstrated quantitative and qualitative changes in central neural representation of complex sounds. Crucially, these changes appear to involve changes in how information is transformed along the cortical hierarchy. For this reason, a rigorous study of the effects of age-related hearing loss must include a comparison of cortical areas, such as core versus belt, that function at different levels of the processing hierarchy in normal hearing. Moreover, these central changes impact not only ‘bottom-up’ sound processing along the ascending auditory pathway, but also ‘top-down’ modulation by attention. The proposed studies will therefore contrast how complex sounds in challenging listening environments are processed in young versus old animals while those animals are performing perceptual tasks that either do or do not require auditory attention. These studies will be the first to track changes in how multiple complex sounds are encoded across hierarchical levels of processing in the auditory pathway in a primate model of aging, while allowing direct comparisons between cortical response changes and auditory perceptual deficits.

项目概要/摘要 与年龄相关的听力损失是一个普遍存在的问题，估计影响多达三分之一的人口，这种情况比“听力困难”更令人痛苦，相反，它与认知等一系列并发症有关。目前尚不清楚这是一种因果关系还是一种附带现象，如果是前者，简单的干预措施很可能会改善老年人的心理健康状况。是为了识别神经编码原理使听众能够理解并关注与其他声音（即背景）混合出现的特定声音（即您正在听的声音），这在许多聆听情况下都很常见。这是一个极其困难的计算问题，但听力正常的人可以毫不费力地解决它，不幸的是，这种非凡的能力几乎总是随着年龄的增长而下降，导致人们在嘈杂的环境中难以理解语音。需要了解大脑如何在复杂的声学场景中处理声音，特别是在老年人中，大脑如何无法处理声音，听觉通路不同阶段采用的编码策略中与年龄相关的变化被认为涉及补偿。与来自外围阶段的输入衰减相关的变化，最近对老年动物的研究表明，复杂声音的中枢神经表征发生了数量和质量的变化，至关重要的是，这些变化似乎涉及信息转换方式的变化。因此，对与年龄相关的听力损失的影响的严格研究必须包括对正常听力处理层次中不同级别的皮质区域（例如核心区域和带状区域）进行比较。变化不仅影响沿上行听觉通路的“自下而上”的声音处理，而且还影响注意力的“自上而下”的调制，因此，拟议的研究将对比在具有挑战性的聆听环境中复杂声音的处理方式。这些研究将首次追踪灵长类动物模型中听觉通路中多个复杂声音在不同处理层次上的编码方式的变化。衰老的影响，同时允许直接比较皮质反应变化和听觉感知缺陷。