Different Associations between Auditory Function and Cognition Depending on Type of Auditory Function and Type of Cognition

Objectives: Previous studies strongly suggest that declines in auditory threshold can lead to impaired cognition. The aim of this study was to expand that picture by investigating how the relationships between age, auditory function, and cognitive function vary with the types of auditory and cognitive function considered. Design: Three auditory constructs (threshold, temporal-order identification, and gap detection) were modeled to have an effect on four cognitive constructs (episodic long-term memory, semantic long-term memory, working memory, and cognitive processing speed) together with age that could have an effect on both cognitive and auditory constructs. The model was evaluated with structural equation modeling of the data from 213 adults ranging in age from 18 to 86 years. Results: The model provided good a fit to the data. Regarding the auditory measures, temporal-order identification had the strongest effect on the cognitive functions, followed by weaker indirect effects for gap detection and nonsignificant effects for threshold. Regarding the cognitive measures, the association with audition was strongest for semantic long-term memory and working memory but weaker for episodic long-term memory and cognitive speed. Age had a very strong effect on threshold and cognitive speed, a moderate effect on temporal-order identification, episodic long-term memory, and working memory, a weak effect on gap detection, and nonsignificant, close to zero effect on semantic long-term memory. Conclusions: The result shows that auditory temporal-order function has the strongest effect on cognition, which has implications both for which auditory concepts to include in cognitive hearing science experiments and for practitioners. The fact that the total effect of age was different for different aspects of cognition and partly mediated via auditory concepts is also discussed. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CCBY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Supplemental digital content is available for this article. Direct URL citations appear in the printed text and are provided in the HTML and text of this article on the journal’s Web site (www.ear-hearing.com). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: This study was financed by an excellence grant [349-2007-8654] from the Swedish Research council; a grant [2012-1693] from The Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (to J.R.) and a grant [R01 AG008293] from the National Institute on Aging (to L.H.). The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. Address for correspondence: Henrik Danielsson, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden. Email: henrik.danielsson@liu.se Received December 14, 2016; accepted December 18, 2018. Copyright © 2019 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.

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