Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 51, Issue 2 P91-P93, Copyright © 1996 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

Aging and the segregation of auditory stimulus sequences

C Alain, KH Ogawa and DL Woods
Department of Neurology and Center for Neuroscience, University of California at Davis, USA.

This study aimed to clarify whether the age-related decline in selective attention widely reported in the literature can be attributed to a selective deficit in the segregation of relevant streams of sound from irrelevant ones. Young and older individuals responded to infrequent deviant stimuli (targets) mixed with distractors in situations that facilitated perception of one or two streams of sounds. Both young and older adults showed the same degree of improvement in performance under conditions that promoted auditory streaming. However, in both listening conditions young subjects were faster and more accurate than older subjects in responding to target zones. Thus, it appears that age-related declines in auditory selective attention cannot be attributed to a selective deficit in the segregation of auditory sequences, but occur in a subsequent stage of processing such as response selection and/or execution.