Fullgrabe_FiNS20.pdf (197.7 kB)
On the possible overestimation of cognitive decline: the impact of age-related hearing loss on cognitive-test performance
journal contribution
posted on 2020-07-03, 15:45 authored by Christian FullgrabeIndividual differences and age-related normal and pathological changes in mental abilities require the use of cognitive screening and assessment tools. However, simultaneously occurring deficits in sensory processing, whose prevalence increases especially in old age, may negatively impact cognitive-test performance and thus result in an overestimation of cognitive decline. This hypothesis was tested using an impairment-simulation approach. Young normal-hearing university students performed three memory tasks, using auditorily presented speech stimuli that were either unprocessed or processed to mimic some of the perceptual consequences of age-related hearing loss (ARHL). Both short-term-memory and working-memory capacities were significantly lower in the simulated-hearing-loss condition, despite good intelligibility of the test stimuli. The findings are consistent with the notion that, in case of ARHL, the perceptual processing of auditory stimuli used in cognitive assessments requires additional (cognitive) resources that cannot be used toward the execution of the cognitive task itself. Researchers and clinicians would be well advised to consider sensory impairments as a confounding variable when administering cognitive tasks and interpreting their results.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Frontiers in NeuroscienceVolume
14Publisher
Frontiers Media SAVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorPublisher statement
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Acceptance date
2020-04-14Publication date
2020-06-09Copyright date
2020eISSN
1662-453XPublisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Dr Christian Fullgrabe. Deposit date: 3 July 2020Article number
454Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC