The influence of auditory change on cognitive processes associated with aging in virtual reality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background With increased age, older adults experience subtle changes in their cognitive functioning. For example, it is well established that our ability to complete dual‐tasking activities decreases with increased age and cognitive decline. One issue with current dual‐task paradigms is the lack of ecological value in lab‐based environments. The present study employed working memory (WM) tasks designed within an immersive and interactive virtual reality (VR) environment by the National Research Council Canada, to examine the processing of unattended input using event‐related potentials (ERPs) which measure the changes in the electrical activity of the brain. Method Twenty young adults (ages 17‐30) and twenty healthy older adults (ages 65+) were recruited from the Rotman Research Institute. Participants were engaged in a VR‐WM task while to‐be‐ignored auditory stimuli were presented. The difficulty of the VR tasks was designed to be either very easy or very difficult. Auditory stimulus with an average intensity of 60‐90 dB SPL were presented in a fast (low saliency) and a slow (high saliency) presentation rate. Result During the VR task, young adults’ accuracy was significantly higher in the easy condition than in the difficult condition (p < .001). When auditory stimuli were presented rapidly, a robust ERP was elicited at the frontal (p = 0.005) and central (p = 0.003) brain regions. The slowly presented auditory stimulus elicited a robust ERP at the central brain region (p = 0.003). Preliminary data indicates that accuracy was lower in older adults than young adults for both conditions. Older adults also had lower accuracy in the hard condition than in the easy condition. Conclusion The ERPs examined here show that participants were able to successfully switch processing priorities away from the VR‐WM task to salient auditory stimulus, but that older adults were less efficient than younger adults. These tools (VR, auditory stimuli, and ERPs) may be useful at detecting subtle electrophysiological and cognitive changes that occur with age and cognitive decline. They may offer promise to identify the pathology underlying cognitive impairment in aging and could reveal the electrophysiological changes associated with conversion to dementia at an individual level in clinical and non‐clinical settings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".