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Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain

Healthy aging is accompanied by listening difficulties, including decreased speech comprehension, that stem from an ill-understood combination of sensory and cognitive changes. Here, we use electroencephalography to demonstrate that auditory neural oscillations of older adults entrain less firmly an...

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Autores principales: Henry, Molly J., Herrmann, Björn, Kunke, Dunja, Obleser, Jonas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5490185/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28654081
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15801
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author Henry, Molly J.
Herrmann, Björn
Kunke, Dunja
Obleser, Jonas
author_facet Henry, Molly J.
Herrmann, Björn
Kunke, Dunja
Obleser, Jonas
author_sort Henry, Molly J.
collection PubMed
description Healthy aging is accompanied by listening difficulties, including decreased speech comprehension, that stem from an ill-understood combination of sensory and cognitive changes. Here, we use electroencephalography to demonstrate that auditory neural oscillations of older adults entrain less firmly and less flexibly to speech-paced (∼3 Hz) rhythms than younger adults’ during attentive listening. These neural entrainment effects are distinct in magnitude and origin from the neural response to sound per se. Non-entrained parieto-occipital alpha (8–12 Hz) oscillations are enhanced in young adults, but suppressed in older participants, during attentive listening. Entrained neural phase and task-induced alpha amplitude exert opposite, complementary effects on listening performance: higher alpha amplitude is associated with reduced entrainment-driven behavioural performance modulation. Thus, alpha amplitude as a task-driven, neuro-modulatory signal can counteract the behavioural corollaries of neural entrainment. Balancing these two neural strategies may present new paths for intervention in age-related listening difficulties.
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spelling pubmed-54901852017-07-06 Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain Henry, Molly J. Herrmann, Björn Kunke, Dunja Obleser, Jonas Nat Commun Article Healthy aging is accompanied by listening difficulties, including decreased speech comprehension, that stem from an ill-understood combination of sensory and cognitive changes. Here, we use electroencephalography to demonstrate that auditory neural oscillations of older adults entrain less firmly and less flexibly to speech-paced (∼3 Hz) rhythms than younger adults’ during attentive listening. These neural entrainment effects are distinct in magnitude and origin from the neural response to sound per se. Non-entrained parieto-occipital alpha (8–12 Hz) oscillations are enhanced in young adults, but suppressed in older participants, during attentive listening. Entrained neural phase and task-induced alpha amplitude exert opposite, complementary effects on listening performance: higher alpha amplitude is associated with reduced entrainment-driven behavioural performance modulation. Thus, alpha amplitude as a task-driven, neuro-modulatory signal can counteract the behavioural corollaries of neural entrainment. Balancing these two neural strategies may present new paths for intervention in age-related listening difficulties. Nature Publishing Group 2017-06-27 /pmc/articles/PMC5490185/ /pubmed/28654081 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15801 Text en Copyright © 2017, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 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 license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Henry, Molly J.
Herrmann, Björn
Kunke, Dunja
Obleser, Jonas
Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
title Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
title_full Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
title_fullStr Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
title_full_unstemmed Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
title_short Aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
title_sort aging affects the balance of neural entrainment and top-down neural modulation in the listening brain
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5490185/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28654081
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15801
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