Aging and the segregation of auditory stimulus sequences

This study aimed to clarify whether the age-related decline in selective attention widely reported in the literature can be attributed to a selective deficit in the segregation of relevant streams of sounds from irrelevant ones. Young and older individuals responded to infrequent deviant stimuli (targets) mixed with distractors in situations that facilitated perception of one or two streams of sounds. Both young and older adults showed the same degree of improvement in performance under conditions that promoted auditory streaming. However, in both listening conditions young subjects were faster and more accurate than older subjects in responding to target tones. Thus, it appears that age-related declines in auditory selective attention cannot be attributed to a selective deficit in the segregation of auditory sequences, but occur in a subsequent stage of processing such as response selection and/or execution.