Audiology features
Why and what should hearing care professionals know about cognitive impairment and dementia
Good reasons to care about cognitive impairment and dementia in audiology If asking people what they fear most when getting to old age, it is cognitive decline that is named most often. This comes with the expectation of limitations in...
Secrets of the listening brain: what measuring the brain can tell us about hearing aid use and more
In a typical audiology clinic, on any given day, a person is waiting to see an audiologist to get a hearing aid (HA). It might have taken over 10 years to get to this point of considering a hearing aid(s)...
Cognitive spare capacity: what is it and why does it matter?
Cognition refers to thinking and memory. So why would cognition be a useful concept for ENTs and audiologists? Audition provides our main channel of communication and when we speak to each other, we want to exchange thoughts and remember what...
Cognitive effort and listening in everyday life
Dining with family members, amongst the clinking of dishes and glasses, the sounds of conversations and laughter, the husband, a user of hearing aids, misses his wife’s request to bring another bottle of wine. After a third try, the wife,...
How cognition influences hearing aid use
Introduction Hearing aids are designed to provide amplification for individuals with poor auditory sensitivity. Signal processing algorithms are designed and implemented in hearing aids to further enhance speech intelligibility and to improve listening comfort by attenuating unwanted background noise. Sarampalis...
The role of metrics in studies of hearing and cognition
Introduction When perceiving sounds in real-world listening environments, older adults encounter several sources of degradation that can interfere with the perceptual process (Figure 1). Target signals (i.e. the sounds that a listener wants to focus on) have specific acoustic characteristics...
The ear-brain connection in cochlear implant users: learning to listen again
While the cochlear implant (CI) has been a tremendous success in restoring hearing to deaf individuals, the implantation outcome still varies across CI users [1]. Some demographic factors, such as duration of deafness, and peripheral factors, such as electrode placement,...
The ear-brain connection: the role of cognition in neural speech processing
Audiologists and other hearing healthcare professionals have become increasingly interested in the importance of cognitive function in the assessment and management of hearing loss, especially in light of evidence suggesting a link between hearing loss and cognitive decline in older...
Could social isolation be a factor in the link between hearing loss and dementia?
In 1802, Beethoven wrote to his brothers Carl and Johann about his hearing loss: “You men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause...
What does functional neuroimaging tell us about tinnitus?
One of the most common causes of tinnitus is noise exposure, be that either cumulative day-to-day exposure over a lifetime or experience of acute noise trauma such as a loud concert or shooting incident. Observational data indicate that up to...
What’s new in auditory processing?
Auditory processing disorder (APD) has had a controversial history, stemming mainly from lack of scientific rigor and accepted clinical definition. That situation is now changing. Driven by the huge number of people with unaddressed listening difficulties, basic discoveries in neuroscience,...
The Brain’s Connectome – a symphony inside our brains and how hearing loss disturbs the music
Understand us; where do we begin? In this article the authors’ introduce a project that may uncover that our personalities and traits are a product of the interconnected wiring within our brain. The team discusses the Human Connectome Project and...
