The ERC Consolidator project AUDADAPT (2016–2021) isolated the determinants of successful adaptation to sensory and cognitive change in healthy ageing. The project provided a unique selec-tion of behaviour, EEG, and functional MR from a community cohort of N=160 middle-aged and older adults at two time points two years apart.
The AUDADAPT project can be characterised and judged against its three specific aims, in tune with the overarching project objectives.
1. PUSHING THE ENVELOPE HOW WE CONCEIVE OF AUDITION IN MIDDLE-AGE ADULTHOOD: Our work did entail audiological testing on one end, and it entailed a large-scale, whole-brain characterization of brain dynamics on the other end. Our project measured and modelled the sensory and cognitive processes in middle-aged adult, prior to or in the absence of major hearing problems, as a process that entails all these variables. The AUDADAPT project has helped expose the limits that “classical” hearing assessments hold in explaining individual environment-to-brain and brain-to-overt-behavioural processes.
2. FUSING PSYCHOLOGICAL AND NEUROSCIENTIFIC MODELLING OF AUDITION IN MIDDLE-AGE ADULTHOOD: In interdigitated analysis work packages, we have modelled the neural results along with the data on cognitive fitness, personality structure, as well as objective and subjective measures of hearing acuity in a multivariate framework. This modelling work has allowed us to better understand the interplay of neural and psychological mechanisms which determine how well an ageing listener adapts to sensory decline.
3. PROVIDING NEW A LONGITUDINAL PERSPECTIVE IN THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF HEARING AND COMMUNICATION. Longitudinal data are of the essence in any form of life-span research. Any attempt at causal inference is greatly facilitated if temporal precedence and observed changes can be substantiated by repeated measures over time in the same cohort. Thus, the ERC AUDADAPT cohort is hardly precedented and of future value to our field: More than N=160 listeners aged 40 to 80 have provided demographic, basic health, personality, audiological, cognitive, and neuroscientific data (EEG, fMRI) at least once. A subset of N=120 has been tested again with identical setup after a period of 18–24 months. All data will be and largely are already entirely open-access. See
https://osf.io/28r57/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)Not least, the AUDADAPT project has contributed to theorising and conceptualising the ageing listening brain in a series of well-noted review and opinion articles.
