Investigation of age-related differences in listening attention

Auditory attention is required to enable listening in noisy environments when a limited number of perceptual sources are available. Many studies investigating the relationship between auditory performance and cognitive skills have focused on general cognitive skills. Auditory and cognitive processes are affected by aging. In this study, it was aimed to examine age-related changes in auditory attention and difficult listening conditions. A total of 91 individuals participated in the study. A total of 70 individuals were included in the study, 34 young individuals between the agesof 18-40 with normal hearing as study group I and 36 individuals between the ages of 40-60 as study group II. Raven Standard Progressive Matrices Test and Marking Test tests to assess individuals' cognitive abilities; Turkish Matrix Test, which is one of the tests for understanding speech in noise, and the Test of Attenion in Listening which was developed to evaluate auditory attention, were applied to all participants. The results of the tests were compared between the two groups. As a result of the study, a significant difference was found between young individuals and middle-aged individuals in Listening Attention Test results (p<.05). No significant difference was found between young individuals and elderly individuals in Turkish Matrix Test results (p>.05). Significant differences were found between young and middle-aged individuals in all cognitive tests (p<0.05). In this study, when young and middle-aged individuals were compared, it was observed that the reaction times of the middle-aged group were prolonged in attention tasks during listening. A decrease in auditory attention performance and cognitive skills was observed with age. The findings show that auditory attention performance starts to decline from middle age. As a result of the findings obtained in this study, it was found that auditory attention performance worsened with age. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate the auditory attention performance of middle-aged adults aged 40 and over by examining auditory attention performance and speech understanding in noise together.