Distinct Effects of Perceptual Quality on Auditory Word Recognition, Memory Formation and Recall in a Neural Model of Sequential Memory

Adults with sensory impairment, such as reduced hearing acuity, have impaired ability to recall identifiable words, even when their memory is otherwise normal. We hypothesize that poorer stimulus quality causes weaker activity in neurons responsive to the stimulus and more time to elapse between stimulus onset and identification. The weaker activity and increased delay to stimulus identification reduce the necessary strengthening of connections between neurons active before stimulus presentation and neurons active at the time of stimulus identification. We test our hypothesis through a biologically motivated computational model, which performs item recognition, memory formation and memory retrieval. In our simulations, spiking neurons are distributed into pools representing either items or context, in two separate, but connected winner-takes-all (WTA) networks. We include associative, Hebbian learning, by comparing multiple forms of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), which strengthen synapses between coactive neurons during stimulus identification. Synaptic strengthening by STDP can be sufficient to reactivate neurons during recall if their activity during a prior stimulus rose strongly and rapidly. We find that a single poor quality stimulus impairs recall of neighboring stimuli as well as the weak stimulus itself. We demonstrate that within the WTA paradigm of word recognition, reactivation of separate, connected sets of non-word, context cells permits reverse recall. Also, only with such coactive context cells, does slowing the rate of stimulus presentation increase recall probability. We conclude that significant temporal overlap of neural activity patterns, absent from individual WTA networks, is necessary to match behavioral data for word recall

Differences in hearing acuity among “normal-hearing” young adults modulate the neural basis for speech comprehension

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate how subtle differences in hearing acuity affect the neural systems supporting speech processing in young adults. Auditory sentence comprehension requires perceiving a complex acoustic signal and performing linguistic operations to extract the correct meaning. We used functional MRI to monitor human brain activity while adults aged 18–41 years listened to spoken sentences. The sentences varied in their level of syntactic processing demands, containing either a subject-relative or object-relative center-embedded clause. All participants self-reported normal hearing, confirmed by audiometric testing, with some variation within a clinically normal range. We found that participants showed activity related to sentence processing in a left-lateralized frontotemporal network. Although accuracy was generally high, participants still made some errors, which were associated with increased activity in bilateral cingulo-opercular and frontoparietal attention networks. A whole-brain regression analysis revealed that activity in a right anterior middle frontal gyrus (aMFG) component of the frontoparietal attention network was related to individual differences in hearing acuity, such that listeners with poorer hearing showed greater recruitment of this region when successfully understanding a sentence. The activity in right aMFGs for listeners with poor hearing did not differ as a function of sentence type, suggesting a general mechanism that is independent of linguistic processing demands. Our results suggest that even modest variations in hearing ability impact the systems supporting auditory speech comprehension, and that auditory sentence comprehension entails the coordination of a left perisylvian network that is sensitive to linguistic variation with an executive attention network that responds to acoustic challenge.</jats:p

Kualitas Hidup Pasien Diabetes Melitus Tipe 2 di Puskesmas Se Kota Kupang

Diabetes Mellitus is well known as a chronic disease which can lead to a decrease in quality of life in all domains. The study aims to explore the diabetic type 2 patient\u27s quality of life and find out the factors affecting in type 2 diabetic mellitus patients. The cross-sectional study design is used that included 65 patient with type 2 diabetes mellitus, in 11 public health centers of Kupang City. Data were collected by using Short Form Survey (SF-36) that assessed 8-scale health profile. Independent sample t-test is used to analyze the correlation between the factors affecting and the quality of life. the study showed that the QoL of DM patients decreased in all 8- health profile including physical functioning, social functioning, mental health, general health, pain, change in the role due to physical problems and emotional problems. The Study also showed there was a relationship between gender, duration of suffering from Diabetes mellitus, and complications to the quality of life. Male perceived a better quality of life than female

Dissociations in perceptual learning revealed by adult age differences in adaptation to time-compressed speech.

When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults&apos; performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults&apos; ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated for starting accuracy with young adults, adapted at a rate and magnitude comparable to young adults. However, unlike young adults, older adults failed to transfer this learning to a different speech rate and did not show additional benefit when practice exceeded 20 sentences. Listeners did not adapt to speech degraded by noise, indicating that adaptation to timecompressed speech was not attributable to task familiarity. Finally, both young and older adults adapted to spectrally shifted noise-vocoded speech. The authors conclude that initial perceptual learning is comparable in young and older adults but maintenance and transfer of this learning decline with age

The Psychology of human memory

xiv, 429 p.; 23 cm

A Tipping Point in Listening Effort: Effects of Linguistic Complexity and Age-Related Hearing Loss on Sentence Comprehension

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between effort and performance. Early formulations implied that, as the challenge of a task increases, individuals will exert more effort, with resultant maintenance of stable performance. We report an experiment in which normal-hearing young adults, normal-hearing older adults, and older adults with age-related mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for comprehension of recorded sentences that varied the comprehension challenge in two ways. First, sentences were constructed that expressed their meaning either with a simpler subject-relative syntactic structure or a more computationally demanding object-relative structure. Second, for each sentence type, an adjectival phrase was inserted that created either a short or long gap in the sentence between the agent performing an action and the action being performed. The measurement of pupil dilation as an index of processing effort showed effort to increase with task difficulty until a difficulty tipping point was reached. Beyond this point, the measurement of pupil size revealed a commitment of effort by the two groups of older adults who failed to keep pace with task demands as evidenced by reduced comprehension accuracy. We take these pupillometry data as revealing a complex relationship between task difficulty, effort, and performance that might not otherwise appear from task performance alone