Reward Enhances Online Participants' Engagement With a Demanding Auditory Task

Age Deficits in Associative Memory Are Not Alleviated by Multisensory Paradigms

OBJECTIVES

Age deficits in memory are widespread, this affects individuals at a personal level, and investigating memory has been a key focus in cognitive aging research. Age deficits occur in memory for an episode, where information from the environment is integrated through the senses into an episodic event via associative memory. Associating items in memory has been shown to be particularly difficult for older adults but can often be alleviated by providing support from the external environment. The current investigation explored the potential for increased sensory input (multimodal stimuli) to alleviate age deficits in associative memory. Here, we present compelling evidence, supported by Bayesian analysis, for a null age-by-modality interaction.

METHODS

Across three preregistered studies, young and older adults (n = 860) completed associative memory tasks either in single modalities or in multimodal formats. Study 1 used either visual text (unimodal) or video introductions (multimodal) to test memory for name-face associations. Studies 2 and 3 tested memory for paired associates. Study 2 used unimodal visual presentation or cross-modal visual-auditory word pairs in a cued recall paradigm. Study 3 presented word pairs as visual only, auditory only, or audiovisual and tested memory separately for items (individual words) or associations (word pairings).

RESULTS

Typical age deficits in associative memory emerged, but these were not alleviated by multimodal presentation.

DISCUSSION

The lack of multimodal support for associative memory indicates that perceptual manipulations are less effective than other forms of environmental support at alleviating age deficits in associative memory.

Concurrent Encoding of Sequence Predictability and Event-Evoked Prediction Error in Unfolding Auditory Patterns

Human listeners possess an innate capacity to discern patterns within rapidly unfolding sensory input. Core questions, guiding ongoing research, focus on the mechanisms through which these representations are acquired and whether the brain prioritizes or suppresses predictable sensory signals. Previous work, using fast auditory sequences (tone-pips presented at a rate of 20 Hz), revealed sustained response effects that appear to track the dynamic predictability of the sequence. Here, we extend the investigation to slower sequences (4 Hz), permitting the isolation of responses to individual tones. Stimuli were 50 ms tone-pips, ordered into random (RND) and regular (REG; a repeating pattern of 10 frequencies) sequences; Two timing profiles were created: in "fast" sequences, tone-pips were presented in direct succession (20 Hz); in "slow" sequences, tone-pips were separated by a 200 ms silent gap (4 Hz). Naive participants (N = 22; both sexes) passively listened to these sequences, while brain responses were recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Results unveiled a heightened magnitude of sustained brain responses in REG when compared to RND patterns. This manifested from three tones after the onset of the pattern repetition, even in the context of slower sequences characterized by extended pattern durations (2,500 ms). This observation underscores the remarkable implicit sensitivity of the auditory brain to acoustic regularities. Importantly, brain responses evoked by single tones exhibited the opposite pattern-stronger responses to tones in RND than REG sequences. The demonstration of simultaneous but opposing sustained and evoked response effects reveals concurrent processes that shape the representation of unfolding auditory patterns.

Generalization of auditory expertise in audio engineers and instrumental musicians

From auditory perception to general cognition, the ability to play a musical instrument has been associated with skills both related and unrelated to music. However, it is unclear if these effects are bound to the specific characteristics of musical instrument training, as little attention has been paid to other populations such as audio engineers and designers whose auditory expertise may match or surpass that of musicians in specific auditory tasks or more naturalistic acoustic scenarios. We explored this possibility by comparing students of audio engineering (n = 20) to matched conservatory-trained instrumentalists (n = 24) and to naive controls (n = 20) on measures of auditory discrimination, auditory scene analysis, and speech in noise perception. We found that audio engineers and performing musicians had generally lower psychophysical thresholds than controls, with pitch perception showing the largest effect size. Compared to controls, audio engineers could better memorise and recall auditory scenes composed of non-musical sounds, whereas instrumental musicians performed best in a sustained selective attention task with two competing streams of tones. Finally, in a diotic speech-in-babble task, musicians showed lower signal-to-noise-ratio thresholds than both controls and engineers; however, a follow-up online study did not replicate this musician advantage. We also observed differences in personality that might account for group-based self-selection biases. Overall, we showed that investigating a wider range of forms of auditory expertise can help us corroborate (or challenge) the specificity of the advantages previously associated with musical instrument training.

Divergent effects of listening demands and evaluative threat on listening effort in online and laboratory settings

Objective

Listening effort (LE) varies as a function of listening demands, motivation and resource availability, among other things. Motivation is posited to have a greater influence on listening effort under high, compared to low, listening demands.

Methods

To test this prediction, we manipulated the listening demands of a speech recognition task using tone vocoders to create moderate and high listening demand conditions. We manipulated motivation using evaluative threat, i.e., informing participants that they must reach a particular "score" for their results to be usable. Resource availability was assessed by means of working memory span and included as a fixed effects predictor. Outcome measures were indices of LE, including reaction times (RTs), self-rated work and self-rated tiredness, in addition to task performance (correct response rates). Given the recent popularity of online studies, we also wanted to examine the effect of experimental context (online vs. laboratory) on the efficacy of manipulations of listening demands and motivation. We carried out two highly similar experiments with two groups of 37 young adults, a laboratory experiment and an online experiment. To make listening demands comparable between the two studies, vocoder settings had to differ. All results were analysed using linear mixed models.

Results

Results showed that under laboratory conditions, listening demands affected all outcomes, with significantly lower correct response rates, slower RTs and greater self-rated work with higher listening demands. In the online study, listening demands only affected RTs. In addition, motivation affected self-rated work. Resource availability was only a significant predictor for RTs in the online study.

Discussion

These results show that the influence of motivation and listening demands on LE depends on the type of outcome measures used and the experimental context. It may also depend on the exact vocoder settings. A controlled laboratory settings and/or particular vocoder settings may be necessary to observe all expected effects of listening demands and motivation.

Implicit auditory memory in older listeners: From encoding to 6-month retention

Any listening task, from sound recognition to sound-based communication, rests on auditory memory which is known to decline in healthy ageing. However, how this decline maps onto multiple components and stages of auditory memory remains poorly characterised. In an online unsupervised longitudinal study, we tested ageing effects on implicit auditory memory for rapid tone patterns. The test required participants (younger, aged 20-30, and older adults aged 60-70) to quickly respond to rapid regularly repeating patterns emerging from random sequences. Patterns were novel in most trials (REGn), but unbeknownst to the participants, a few distinct patterns reoccurred identically throughout the sessions (REGr). After correcting for processing speed, the response times (RT) to REGn should reflect the information held in echoic and short-term memory before detecting the pattern; long-term memory formation and retention should be reflected by the RT advantage (RTA) to REGr vs REGn which is expected to grow with exposure. Older participants were slower than younger adults in detecting REGn and exhibited a smaller RTA to REGr. Computational simulations using a model of auditory sequence memory indicated that these effects reflect age-related limitations both in early and long-term memory stages. In contrast to ageing-related accelerated forgetting of verbal material, here older adults maintained stable memory traces for REGr patterns up to 6 months after the first exposure. The results demonstrate that ageing is associated with reduced short-term memory and long-term memory formation for tone patterns, but not with forgetting, even over surprisingly long timescales.

No Link Between Speech-in-Noise Perception and Auditory Sensory Memory - Evidence From a Large Cohort of Older and Younger Listeners

A growing literature is demonstrating a link between working memory (WM) and speech-in-noise (SiN) perception. However, the nature of this correlation and which components of WM might underlie it, are being debated. We investigated how SiN reception links with auditory sensory memory (aSM) - the low-level processes that support the short-term maintenance of temporally unfolding sounds. A large sample of old (N = 199, 60-79 yo) and young (N = 149, 20-35 yo) participants was recruited online and performed a coordinate response measure-based speech-in-babble task that taps listeners' ability to track a speech target in background noise. We used two tasks to investigate implicit and explicit aSM. Both were based on tone patterns overlapping in processing time scales with speech (presentation rate of tones 20 Hz; of patterns 2 Hz). We hypothesised that a link between SiN and aSM may be particularly apparent in older listeners due to age-related reduction in both SiN reception and aSM. We confirmed impaired SiN reception in the older cohort and demonstrated reduced aSM performance in those listeners. However, SiN and aSM did not share variability. Across the two age groups, SiN performance was predicted by a binaural processing test and age. The results suggest that previously observed links between WM and SiN may relate to the executive components and other cognitive demands of the used tasks. This finding helps to constrain the search for the perceptual and cognitive factors that explain individual variability in SiN performance.

Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics

Most human auditory psychophysics research has historically been conducted in carefully controlled environments with calibrated audio equipment, and over potentially hours of repetitive testing with expert listeners. Here, we operationally define such conditions as having high ‘auditory hygiene’. From this perspective, conducting auditory psychophysical paradigms online presents a serious challenge, in that results may hinge on absolute sound presentation level, reliably estimated perceptual thresholds, low and controlled background noise levels, and sustained motivation and attention. We introduce a set of procedures that address these challenges and facilitate auditory hygiene for online auditory psychophysics. First, we establish a simple means of setting sound presentation levels. Across a set of four level-setting conditions conducted in person, we demonstrate the stability and robustness of this level setting procedure in open air and controlled settings. Second, we test participants’ tone-in-noise thresholds using widely adopted online experiment platforms and demonstrate that reliable threshold estimates can be derived online in approximately one minute of testing. Third, using these level and threshold setting procedures to establish participant-specific stimulus conditions, we show that an online implementation of the classic probe-signal paradigm can be used to demonstrate frequency-selective attention on an individual-participant basis, using a third of the trials used in recent in-lab experiments. Finally, we show how threshold and attentional measures relate to well-validated assays of online participants’ in-task motivation, fatigue, and confidence. This demonstrates the promise of online auditory psychophysics for addressing new auditory perception and neuroscience questions quickly, efficiently, and with more diverse samples. Code for the tests is publicly available through Pavlovia and Gorilla.