Ayberk Aydın Tunç
Session
A better understanding of cortical neuroplasticity accompanying hearing loss may allow us to improve intervention and rehabilitation for patients with hearing loss. Compensation for the deleterious effects of hearing loss include recruitment of alternative brain networks during cortical processing. Our experiments suggest that early stage, mild-moderate, age-related hearing loss ranging results in significant changes in neural resource allocation, reflecting patterns of cross-modal compensation from the visual and somatosensory modalities, increased listening effort, and decreased cognitive spare capacity. Adults with untreated age-related hearing loss also show evidence of cognitive decline. Treatment with hearing aids reverse cross-modal recruitment of auditory cortex over the course of 6 months, coinciding with gains in auditory speech perception abilities, social-emotional processing and significant improvements in cognitive performance as measured by clinical tests of neurocognition. New data on results of neurocognitive changes with over-the-counter hearing aids will be discussed.