Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Auditory perception is crucial for actively participating in social life, however, reported hearing problems in the aging population still pose a challenge for neuroscientific research. Age related changes may occur in peripheral auditory system (e.g., inner ear). Yet, changes within the auditory cortex may also occur through the lifespan and lead to different processing of sounds. In addition, natural listening environment pose many demands on side of the individual (e.g., discriminating background from foreground sounds, integrating information over time). In order to explore the effect of aging on auditory cortex, we used fMRI to study brain responses over time while participants (18 to 89 years) watched an Alfred Hitchcock short movie. Hitchcock movies have been shown to produce reliable and similar brain activations over time across viewers (Hasson et al., 2008) and, due to their complexity, can been taken as naturalistic-like stimulation. Early processing areas within auditory cortex should produce very similar activation patterns over time across participants as those regions represent the acoustic characteristics of incoming signals. Our results confirmed this claim but also showed a decline of similar activation patterns with age and may reflect an altered acoustic signal due to changes in peripheral auditory system. From primary regions, the information stream reaches later processing areas which draw upon other cognitive abilities (e.g., memory). These areas have been reported to show similar activation patterns over time in young adults (Hasson et al., 2008). Our results replicated this finding but also showed a decline with age. This may be due to the use of compensatory mechanisms to account for the altered acoustic signal. The degree to which compensation is necessary may vary between individuals and, thus, lead to different brain activations. In summary, aging appears to change cortical processing of naturalistic stimuli in auditory cortex.