Evidence for memory-guided auditory attention in aging and hearing loss

Previous studies have linked age-related hearing loss (ARHL) to cognitive decline, but the specific cognitive processes affected remain unclear. The sensory deprivation and cognitive load hypotheses suggest that ARHL makes auditory processing more cognitively demanding, straining overall cognitive resources and reducing the effective use of long-term memory. Memory and attention play a role in auditory perception, enabling listeners to organize complex sounds into meaningful objects that facilitate listening and behaviour. One function of long-term memory is to guide attention, and auditory memory-guided attention engages hippocampal networks that are known to be vulnerable in age-related cognitive decline and hearing loss. Examining the interaction between auditory attention and memory may clarify the associations between ARHL and cognitive decline. We tested the pre-registered hypothesis that older adults with greater ARHL would show reduced ability to form target-to-context associations, resulting in weaker memory-guided attention. Sixty-two adults aged 40–80 years participated in a memory-guided attention task in which they learned to associate background sounds with the spatial location of a probe-tone target. Contrary to predictions, results suggest preserved memory-guided attention in this age group that did not correlate with hearing thresholds. However, accuracy in verbally identifying background sounds was worse in those with greater ARHL, suggesting difficulty with the semantic processing of acoustic scenes. Results indicate that mild-to-moderate hearing loss has little impact on middle-aged and older adults' ability to form long-term memory for auditory target–context associations under the conditions of this study.