Category: Otolaryngology

Hot Topics: Hearing Aids Could Delay Cognitive Decline

katheride March 11, 2020 Hot Topics in Research, Neurology, Otolaryngology

The Effect of Hearing Aid Use on Cognition in Older Adults: Can We Delay Decline or Even Improve Cognitive Function?

Sarant J, Harris D, Busby P, et al. The effect of hearing aid use on cognition in older adults: Can we delay decline or even improve cognitive function? J Clin Med. 2020;9(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9010254

Hearing loss is a modifiable risk factor for dementia in older adults. Whether hearing aid use can delay the onset of cognitive decline is unknown. Participants in this study (aged 62-82 years) were assessed before and 18 months after hearing aid fitting on hearing, cognitive function, speech perception, quality of life, physical activity, loneliness, isolation, mood, and medical health. At baseline, multiple linear regression showed hearing loss and age predicted significantly poorer executive function performance, while tertiary education predicted significantly higher executive function and visual learning performance. At 18 months after hearing aid fitting, speech perception in quiet, self-reported listening disability and quality of life had significantly improved. Group mean scores across the cognitive test battery showed no significant decline, and executive function significantly improved. Reliable Change Index scores also showed either clinically significant improvement or stability in executive function for 97.3% of participants, and for females for working memory, visual attention and visual learning. Relative stability and clinically and statistically significant improvement in cognition were seen in this participant group after 18 months of hearing aid use, suggesting that treatment of hearing loss with hearing aids may delay cognitive decline. Given the small sample size, further follow up is required.

Hot Topics: Long-Held Perception Theory Disproven

katheride November 20, 2019 Hot Topics in Research, Otolaryngology

Rapid visual categorization is not guided by early salience-based selection

Tsotsos, J. K., Kotseruba, I., & Wloka, C. (2019). Rapid visual categorization is not guided by early salience-based selection. Plos One, 14(10), e0224306. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224306

The current dominant visual processing paradigm in both human and machine research is the feedforward, layered hierarchy of neural-like processing elements. Within this paradigm, visual saliency is seen by many to have a specific role, namely that of early selection. Early selection is thought to enable very fast visual performance by limiting processing to only the most salient candidate portions of an image. This strategy has led to a plethora of saliency algorithms that have indeed improved processing time efficiency in machine algorithms, which in turn have strengthened the suggestion that human vision also employs a similar early selection strategy. However, at least one set of critical tests of this idea has never been performed with respect to the role of early selection in human vision. How would the best of the current saliency models perform on the stimuli used by experimentalists who first provided evidence for this visual processing paradigm? Would the algorithms really provide correct candidate sub-images to enable fast categorization on those same images? Do humans really need this early selection for their impressive performance? Here, we report on a new series of tests of these questions whose results suggest that it is quite unlikely that such an early selection process has any role in human rapid visual categorization.