I Can Hear You, I Just Can't Remember You: Deconstructing the Sensory and Cognitive Components of Hearing Loss
Abstract
Hearing loss is commonly thought of as solely a sensory, not cognitive, problem. According to the effortfulness effect, however, those with presbycusis are burdened with an increased attentional cost for auditory processing, taxing the central executive such that working memory is impaired. The excess strain placed on the central executive to decode sensory noise ultimately impairs one’s capacity to attend to and consolidate memories, compromising retention. We hypothesize that the presence of white noise during encoding will mimic the effect of hearing loss sustained in older adults and will impair the retrieval of auditory information in those with normal hearing. Participants were instructed to complete an auditory working memory load task in which they heard five to-be-remembered words, followed by a distractor task before they had to recall the list of words. White noise was presented either during encoding of the words, during retrieval of the words, during both encoding and retrieval, or not at all. We also measured working memory capacity. We hypothesized that when noise was presented during encoding, participants would recall significantly fewer words and that working memory capacity would predict performance. Our results suggest that noise adds strain to working memory and that hearing loss can be interpreted as a cognitive issue in addition to a perceptual one.
Gulf War Illness is a chronic multi-symptomatic disorder that roughly affects about 32% of deployed veterans from the 1991 Persian Gulf War1. The symptoms are medically unexplained, ranging across cognitive deficits, fatigue, gastrointestinal problems and musculoskeletal pains. Research indicates that the nerve agent sarin plays a major role in the cause of GWI. The Khamisiyah ammunition storage that stored chemical warfare agents such as cyclosarin and sarin was demolished during the Gulf War, releasing these toxins into the atmosphere affecting deployed troops. Sarin is an organophosphate that irreversibly binds and inhibit the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE). AChE inhibition induces a buildup of acetylcholine, disrupting signals between nerves and muscles, which in high doses leads to asphyxiation. Little is known about low dose exposure and alternate targets. Knowing that chemical agents tend to interact with multiple protein sites, we look to identify other sarin targets to better understand the extent in which sarin affects GWI. To do this we followed a reverse screening approach where the ligand sarin is computational docked to a library of protein targets.
Faculty Sponsors
William Collins, Dr. Leanne Boucher Gill
Project Type
Event
Location
Alvin Sherman Library
Start Date
4-6-2022 12:00 PM
End Date
4-7-2022 5:00 PM
I Can Hear You, I Just Can't Remember You: Deconstructing the Sensory and Cognitive Components of Hearing Loss
Alvin Sherman Library
Hearing loss is commonly thought of as solely a sensory, not cognitive, problem. According to the effortfulness effect, however, those with presbycusis are burdened with an increased attentional cost for auditory processing, taxing the central executive such that working memory is impaired. The excess strain placed on the central executive to decode sensory noise ultimately impairs one’s capacity to attend to and consolidate memories, compromising retention. We hypothesize that the presence of white noise during encoding will mimic the effect of hearing loss sustained in older adults and will impair the retrieval of auditory information in those with normal hearing. Participants were instructed to complete an auditory working memory load task in which they heard five to-be-remembered words, followed by a distractor task before they had to recall the list of words. White noise was presented either during encoding of the words, during retrieval of the words, during both encoding and retrieval, or not at all. We also measured working memory capacity. We hypothesized that when noise was presented during encoding, participants would recall significantly fewer words and that working memory capacity would predict performance. Our results suggest that noise adds strain to working memory and that hearing loss can be interpreted as a cognitive issue in addition to a perceptual one.
Gulf War Illness is a chronic multi-symptomatic disorder that roughly affects about 32% of deployed veterans from the 1991 Persian Gulf War1. The symptoms are medically unexplained, ranging across cognitive deficits, fatigue, gastrointestinal problems and musculoskeletal pains. Research indicates that the nerve agent sarin plays a major role in the cause of GWI. The Khamisiyah ammunition storage that stored chemical warfare agents such as cyclosarin and sarin was demolished during the Gulf War, releasing these toxins into the atmosphere affecting deployed troops. Sarin is an organophosphate that irreversibly binds and inhibit the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE). AChE inhibition induces a buildup of acetylcholine, disrupting signals between nerves and muscles, which in high doses leads to asphyxiation. Little is known about low dose exposure and alternate targets. Knowing that chemical agents tend to interact with multiple protein sites, we look to identify other sarin targets to better understand the extent in which sarin affects GWI. To do this we followed a reverse screening approach where the ligand sarin is computational docked to a library of protein targets.
