Symposium: Aging
Friday, Sep 11, 2015
12:00-13:00
Hörsaal 3
The role of temporal structure in the investigation of sensory memory and auditory scene analysis: a healthy-aging perspective
Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany
johanna.rimmele@gmail.com
Everyday communication requires the ability to cope with background noise or multi-talker listening situations. These situations have been reported to be particularly demanding for older adults. The ability to segregate relevant sound from background sound is crucial in these listening situations, and might be impaired in older adults. Recent research suggests that temporal structure processing in auditory sensory memory is involved in the ability to use regular patterns inherent in a sound mixture to stabilize stream segregation. In this talk, first, I will present electrophysiological research that investigates the hypothesis that tone pattern processing in auditory sensory memory, as indicated by MMN component, is impaired in older adults. Second, I will present research on older adults ability to use regular tone patterns for stream segregation. Furthermore, the relevance of these findings for speech processing in multi-talker scenes, as well as possible neurophysiological indicators will be discussed.