Prof. Dr. Christiane Thiel
The presentation will provide an overview of our neuroimaging studies involving elderly volunteers with uncompensated age-related hearing loss. I will demonstrate that hearing loss enhances audiovisual integration but does not trigger cross-modal responses in the auditory cortex. Instead, we found increases in the functional connectivity of the auditory cortex to visual, parietal, and frontal regions during task performance. At rest, this functional connectivity was reduced and correlated with the daily listening effort experienced. Changes in gray matter were also more closely associated with listening effort than with hearing loss itself. Furthermore, I will present findings from several of our neuroimaging studies that did not find evidence of hearing loss affecting brain structure and function, neural activity in working memory tasks, microstructural brain integrity as indicated by diffusion tensor imaging, or signs of increased brain aging in morphometric analyses. Therefore, I propose that the effects of uncompensated hearing loss in healthy, well-educated elderly subjects are subtle, primarily manifesting in changes in functional connectivity and are more related to the daily listening effort than to the hearing loss itself.
