Effects of Aging and Hearing Loss During Rapid Sound Processing

Hearing loss is one of the most common health concerns affecting 1 in 3 Americans over 60 years of age rising to 1 in 2 for those over 85 years old. Contributions to hearing abilities provided by cognitive and memory processes are universally recognized as essential to adequate speech communication, but these processes are not well understood. Cognitive limitations in the ability to rapidly process sequential sounds occur with all listeners but may have more impact on older Veterans with and without hearing impairment. The purpose of this study is to examine and more thoroughly characterize the change in auditory working memory with hearing loss and increasing age. Young and older listeners with and without hearing loss will listen and report on two target sounds embedded in a stream of rapidly occurring sound. The investigators expect that older listeners without hearing loss will have more difficulty than young listeners but that older listeners with hearing impairment will have the most difficulty with this task even when the sounds they are listening to are adjusted to compensate for their hearing loss.