Auditory Cognition in Alzheimer's Disease

To create tests to predict and diagnose dementia, it is important to understand how problems with memory and thinking develop. Hearing loss may be involved in how dementia develops, and testing hearing could help to predict and diagnose the condition. I want to find out whether the effects of hearing loss on memory and thinking are due to problems with people's ability to hold sounds in mind.

This is called auditory working memory (AWM for short). For example, AWM is very important when we are trying to have a conversation in a noisy room and identify the speaker's words correctly. Problems with AWM can mean that people have poor hearing, even though they have good results on conventional hearing tests.

I will examine the brain network for AWM by scanning the brains of people with and without Alzheimer's disease, to find out if there are differences that can explain why problems with memory and thinking occur. I will look at: 1. Whether people with Alzheimer's disease have problems with AWM

2. Whether problems with AWM are linked to changes in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory, and is also affected early in Alzheimer's disease.

This project will provide the basis for further large-scaled studies where people's AWM performance is assessed over time to show how this test can be used to identify people with Alzheimer's disease early in the disease course.