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Say what?
New research from Western University is shining a light on why it’s so hard for some people, especially seniors, to follow a one-on-one conversation in a noisy room.
It turns out older adults have more difficulty tuning out so-called ‘cocktail party’ sound – the background noise that fills a crowded room – even if they don’t have hearing loss.
Most young people are able to focus on one conversation in sea of sounds, because their brains lock in on the speaker’s vocal patterns and block out other noise. The study found older people are less able to distinguish between sounds and can’t track speech rhythms as easily.
“What we found was that younger and older adults have different strategies for ‘listening closely’ to sounds,” said study author Molly Henry, of the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University.
“Ideally, understanding how the brain balances different listening strategies might lead us to design better hearing devices if we know which sound features to enhance.”
The study has been published in Nature Communications.
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