Background/Study Context: Attention can be reflectively oriented to a visual or auditory representation in short-term memory, but it is not clear how aging and hearing acuity affects reflective attention. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether performance in auditory and visual reflective attention tasks varies as a function of participants' age and hearing status.Methods: Young (19 to 33 years) and older adults with normal or mild to moderate hearing loss (62-90 years) completed a delayed match-to-sample task in which participants were first presented with a memory array of four different digits to hold in memory. Two digits were presented visually (left and right hemifield), and two were presented aurally (left and right ears simultaneously). During the retention interval, participants were presented with a cue (dubbed retro-cue), which could be either uninformative or indicated to the participants to retrospectively orient their attention to either auditory short-term memory (ASTM) or visual short-term memory (VSTM). The cue was followed by another delay, after which a single item was presented (i.e., test probe) for comparison (match or no match) with the items held in ASTM and/or VSTM.Results: Overall, informative retro-cue yielded faster response time than uninformative retro-cue. The retro-cue benefit in response time was comparable for auditory and visual-orienting retro-cue and similar in young and older adults. Regression analyses showed that only the auditory-orienting retro-cue benefit was predicted by hearing status rather than age per se.Conclusion: Both younger and older adults can benefit from visual and auditory-orienting retro-cues, but the auditory-orienting retro-cue benefit decreases with poorer hearing acuity. This finding highlights changes in cognitive processes that come with age even in those with just mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and suggest that older adults' performance in working memory tasks is sensitive to low level auditory scene analysis (i.e., concurrent sound segregation).

中文翻译：

---

关注听觉和视觉短期记忆：年龄，听力下降和认知状态的作用。

背景/研究背景：注意力可以在短期记忆中以视觉或听觉的方式反映出来，但尚不清楚衰老和听觉敏锐度如何影响反射注意力。本研究的目的是研究听觉和视觉反射注意力任务的表现是否随参与者的年龄和听力状况而变化。方法：年轻人（19至33岁）和听力正常或中度至中度听力下降的老年人（62-90岁）完成了一个延迟的“采样匹配”任务，在该任务中，首先为参与者展示了四个不同数字的存储阵列，以保存在内存中。视觉上显示了两个数字（左半场和右半场），听觉上显示了两个数字（同时左耳和右耳）。在保留期间，向参与者展示一个提示（称为“后向提示”），该提示可能没有提供任何信息，也可能指示参与者回顾性地将注意力集中于听觉短期记忆（ASTM）或视觉短期记忆（VSTM）。提示之后是另一个延迟，此后出现单个项目（即测试探针），用于与ASTM和/或VSTM中保存的项目进行比较（匹配或不匹配）。结果：总体而言，内容丰富的追溯提示产生得更快响应时间要比毫无根据的追溯。响应时间上的后向提示收益与听觉和视觉导向的后向提示相当，在年轻人和老年人中相似。回归分析表明，仅听觉状态而不是年龄本身可以预测听觉定向的益处。年轻人和老年人均可从视觉和听觉定向暗示中受益，但听觉定向较弱会降低听觉定向优势。这一发现突显了即使是轻度至中度听力损失的人，随着年龄的增长其认知过程也会发生变化，并表明老年人在工作记忆任务中的表现对低水平听觉场景分析（即同时发生的声音隔离）敏感。