Kavassery Venkateswaran Nisha, Suprabha S. Kappadi, Ajith Kumar Uppunda
The Journal of International Advanced Otology - 2025;21(6):1-12
BACKGROUND: The current study aimed to characterize aging-related cortical changes in spatial hearing using electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings evoked in response to spatial deviants (virtual acoustic stimuli). METHODS: A group comparison design was used in the present study. A 3-stimulus oddball paradigm containing 2 deviant stimuli and 1 standard was used to obtain P300 recordings from 64 scalp electrodes. The offline processed EEG data for spatial deviants were compared across age groups using global field power (GFP) and topographic pattern analyses. P300 was recorded on 3 groups of normal hearing listeners: 10 young adults (31-40 years), 12 middle-aged adults (41-50 years), and 13 elderly adults (51-65 years). RESULTS: Group differences were evident on GFP , with the elderly adults manifesting larger GFP at the N1 and P3 regions. Further pattern analyses marked the extinction and emergence of new scalp topographies in the elderly and middle-aged groups starting from 130 ms and lasting until 800 ms. CONCLUSION: The study provides support for aging-related deterioration in inhibitory control over neural coding of space, which becomes apparent from 130 ms poststimulus presentation.
