Journal
FRONTIERS IN AGING NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2016.00329
Keywords
speech comprehension; aging; hearing loss; cognitive effort; eye tracking; pupillometry
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health from National Institute on Aging [R01 AG019714]
- NIH training grants [T32 GM084907, T32 AG000204]
- WM Keck Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In spite of the rapidity of everyday speech, older adults tend to keep up relatively well in day-to-day listening. In laboratory settings older adults do not respond as quickly as younger adults in off-line tests of sentence comprehension, but the question is whether comprehension itself is actually slower. Two unique features of the human eye were used to address this question. First, we tracked eye-movements as 20 young adults and 20 healthy older adults listened to sentences that referred to one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Although the older adults took longer to indicate the referenced object with a cursor-pointing response, their gaze moved to the correct object as rapidly as that of the younger adults. Second, we concurrently measured dilation of the pupil of the eye as a physiological index of effort. This measure revealed that although poorer hearing acuity did not slow processing, success came at the cost of greater processing effort.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available