Adult aging is accompanied by declines in many areas of cognitive functioning, including reduced memory for new information. Potential sources of these declines are well established and include slowed processing, diminished working-memory capacity, and a reduced ability to inhibit interference. In addition, older adults often experience sensory decline, including decreased hearing acuity for high-frequency sounds and deficits in frequency and temporal resolution. These changes add to the challenge faced by older adults in comprehension and memory for everyday rapid speech. Use of contextual information and added perceptual and cognitive effort can partially offset the deleterious effects of these sensory declines. This may, however, come at a cost to resources that might otherwise be available for “downstream” operations such as encoding the speech content in memory. We argue that future research should focus not only on sensory and cognitive functioning as separate domains but also on the dynamics of their interaction.
Wingfield et al. (Wed,) studied this question.