Older listeners often experience hearing difficulties in everyday life. For example, they may not hear birds chirping or footsteps approaching, especially when there are competing sources of sound, or, if they do hear a sound, such as a telephone ringing, they are often unable to determine its location. In noisy environments (such as a restaurant) they often find it difficult to determine who is talking and exactly what is being said. Indeed, in a survey of over 50,000 older adults in Canada, hearing difficulties of one sort or another were reported by over one-third of the respondents, making this the most commonly reported age-related problem.
Researchers at the Human Lab (HL) are currently attempting to find out the reasons for such difficulties. It could be that these communication difficulties are due entirely to hearing problems. There is another possibility, however, that must be considered, namely, that these communication difficulties might be due, in part, to cognitive declines. We know that memory tends to decline with age. In addition, some researchers argue that older adults might not be as good as younger adults at focusing their attention on a single talker, and/or switching their attention from one talker to another, as we often have to do in everyday conversational settings. Hence age-related declines in the cognitive functions essential to speech understanding may be contributing to communication problems in older adults.
One of the goals of the HL is to determine the relative contributions of hearing declines and cognitive declines to communication difficulties in older adults. The good news so far is that most (if not all) of the communication difficulties experienced by healthy older adults are due to problems with hearing rather than to cognitive decline. Our studies have shown that when we make it as hard for younger adults to hear as it is for older adults, age differences in comprehension and memory for lectures and dialogues tend to disappear. The bad news is that, in everyday life, it is almost always the case that it is more difficult for older adults to hear than it is for younger adults because our environments are often quite noisy. Hence, older adults will appear to comprehend and remember less than younger adults simply because they cannot hear as well. Moreover, they will have to work harder than younger adults simply to be able to understand what is being said, leading to Aconversational@ fatigue.
Unfortunately, most people tend to attribute comprehension difficulties in older adults to cognitive declines, when, in fact, they may be due to hearing difficulties. In addition, if older adults are unable to comprehend what is being said because the environment is too noisy (imagine a dinner conversation in a noisy restaurant), they will tend to withdraw from such situations, which can lead to isolation, feelings of loneliness, and even paranoia.
Currently the HL is conducting research to: 1) determine how hearing declines in older adults; 2) assess the impact of hearing declines on the cognitive processes that are required for understanding speech; 3 ) facilitate access to, and use of, assistive listening devices when appropriate; 4) overcome the tendency in the general public to attribute these communication difficulties to cognitive declines; and 5) determine how we can improve listening environments to make them accessible to older adults. To do this, however, we need volunteers who are willing to participate in our studies. Fortunately, seniors in our community have been extremely generous in assisting us in these endeavors. Indeed, we in the HCL, and the general public, are greatly indebted to these volunteers. Because of them we have been able to make substantial progress with respect to our research objectives. We look forward to their continuing cooperation, so that we can continue to work toward alleviating the communication difficulties our senior citizens often encounter in everyday life.