Linguistic information may compensate for age-related decline in attentional filtering

As we age, understanding speech in social situations imposes an increasingly difficult challenge to the auditory system. However, the attentional mechanisms underlying age-related speech comprehension difficulties in multitalker situations remain unclear. We collected EEG signals while 63 normal hearing participants (35 women) from 19 to 71 years performed a speech comprehension task involving a multitalker paradigm at individually adjusted target-to-distractor ratios.

Combining trial-resolved multivariate temporal response function modeling with detailed behavioral comprehension responses, we provide a window into lower-level impairments and possible higher-level compensatory mechanisms across the adult life span. We show that reduced behavioral performance in late adulthood is associated with increased distractor representation. This points towards increased distractibility as a potential mechanism underlying age-related speech comprehension deficits.

Additionally, at the behavioral and neural levels, we show that older adults rely more on higher-level linguistic information. Finally, we show that an increased reliance on word-level linguistic information may compensate for increased distractor tracking and adaptively support comprehension performance across the adult life span. Thus, an increased reliance on higher-level processing could attenuate age-related impairments in attentional filtering.

The authors thank Heike Boethel and Jasmin Wend for their support in data acquisition and the participants for volunteering to participate in the study. A.V.B. was supported by a PhD fellowship from the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) on Cognitive Neuroimaging. G.H. was supported by the Lise Meitner Excellence Program of the Max Planck Society, the German Research Foundation (DFG, HA 6314/4-2; Research Unit 5429/1 (467143400), HA 6314/10-2), and the European Research Council (ERC-2021-COG101043747).

J.O. was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, OB 352/2-2). J.M.R. was supported by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Research Group Cognition and Plasticity, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany Alice Vivien Barchet, Andrea Bruera & Gesa Hartwigsen Cognitive and Biological Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany International Max Planck Research School on Cognitive NeuroImaging (IMPRS CoNI), Leipzig, Germany Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany Department of Psychology, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Germany Center of Brain, Behavior, and Metabolism, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Germany The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.