Search

Auditory deprivation and the restoration of hearing via a cochlear implant (CI) can induce functional plasticity in auditory cortical areas. How these plastic changes affect the ability to integrate combined auditory (A) and visual (V) information is not yet well understood. In the present study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine whether age, temporary deafness and altered sensory experience with a CI can affect audio-visual (AV) interactions in post-lingually deafened CI users. Young and elderly CI users and age-matched NH listeners performed a speeded response task on basic auditory, visual and audio-visual stimuli. Regarding the behavioral results, a redundant signals effect, that is, faster response times to cross-modal (AV) than to both of the two modality-specific stimuli (A, V), was revealed for all groups of participants. Moreover, in all four groups, we found evidence for audio-visual integration. Regarding event-related responses (ERPs), we observed a more pronounced visual modulation of the cortical auditory response at N1 latency (approximately 100 ms after stimulus onset) in the elderly CI users when compared with young CI users and elderly NH listeners. Thus, elderly CI users showed enhanced audio-visual binding which may be a consequence of compensatory strategies developed due to temporary deafness and/or degraded sensory input after implantation. These results indicate that the combination of aging, sensory deprivation and CI facilitates the coupling between the auditory and the visual modality. We suggest that this enhancement in multisensory interactions could be used to optimize auditory rehabilitation, especially in elderly CI users, by the application of strong audio-visually based rehabilitation strategies after implant switch-on.

Recent electrophysiological studies have provided evidence that changes in multisensory processing in auditory cortex cannot only be observed following extensive hearing loss, but also in moderately hearing-impaired subjects. How the reduced auditory input affects audio-visual interactions is however largely unknown. Here we used a cross-modal distraction paradigm to investigate multisensory processing in elderly participants with an age-related high-frequency hearing loss as compared to young and elderly subjects with normal hearing. During the experiment, participants were simultaneously presented with independent streams of auditory and visual input and were asked to categorize either the auditory or visual information while ignoring the other modality. Unisensory sequences without any cross-modal input served as control conditions to assure that all participants were able to perform the task. While all groups performed similarly in these unisensory conditions, hearing-impaired participants showed significantly increased error rates when confronted with distracting cross-modal stimulation. This effect could be observed in both the auditory and the visual task. Supporting these findings, an additional regression analysis indicted that the degree of high-frequency hearing loss significantly modulates cross-modal visual distractibility in the auditory task. These findings provide new evidence that already a moderate sub-clinical hearing loss, a common phenomenon in the elderly population, affects the processing of audio-visual information.

Electrical artifacts caused by the cochlear implant (CI) contaminate electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings from implanted individuals and corrupt auditory evoked potentials (AEPs). Independent component analysis (ICA) is efficient in attenuating the electrical CI artifact and AEPs can be successfully reconstructed. However the manual selection of CI artifact related independent components (ICs) obtained with ICA is unsatisfactory, since it contains expert-choices and is time consuming. We developed a new procedure to evaluate temporal and topographical properties of ICs and semi-automatically select those components representing electrical CI artifact. The CI Artifact Correction (CIAC) algorithm was tested on EEG data from two different studies. The first consists of published datasets from 18 CI users listening to environmental sounds. Compared to the manual IC selection performed by an expert the sensitivity of CIAC was 91.7% and the specificity 92.3%. After CIAC-based attenuation of CI artifacts, a high correlation between age and N1–P2 peak-to-peak amplitude was observed in the AEPs, replicating previously reported findings and further confirming the algorithm's validity. In the second study AEPs in response to pure tone and white noise stimuli from 12 CI users that had also participated in the other study were evaluated. CI artifacts were attenuated based on the IC selection performed semi-automatically by CIAC and manually by one expert. Again, a correlation between N1 amplitude and age was found. Moreover, a high test–retest reliability for AEP N1 amplitudes and latencies suggested that CIAC-based attenuation reliably preserves plausible individual response characteristics. We conclude that CIAC enables the objective and efficient attenuation of the CI artifact in EEG recordings, as it provided a reasonable reconstruction of individual AEPs. The systematic pattern of individual differences in N1 amplitudes and latencies observed with different stimuli at different sessions, strongly suggests that CIAC can overcome the electrical artifact problem. Thus CIAC facilitates the use of cortical AEPs as an objective measurement of auditory rehabilitation.