The Eckert Laboratory

Age-related hearing loss occurs for just about everyone.  We wondered about the potential impact of hearing loss on brain structure because speech recognition can be difficult even after correcting for poor hearing thresholds.  In a sample of 49 older adults, we observed that high frequency hearing loss was associated with lower gray matter volume in [...]

Limited imaging coverage of the brain and susceptibility artifact contributes to missing data in functional imaging studies.  Multiple imputation is one solution for dealing with missing data.  We demonstrate in a recent Neuroimage manuscript the considerable benefit of using multiple imputation in functional imaging studies. There was a 35% increase in the number of voxels [...]

Aging is often associated with increased distractibility that may arise from a failure to adequately suppress the processing of irrelevant sensory information. In our recent Cerebral Cortex paper, we show that decreasing word intelligibility was associated with increasing visual cortex activity in younger, middle-aged, and older adults. In addition, age was related visual cortex activity: [...]

Older adults experience slowed processing speed and the severity of slowed processing speed is a strong predictor of age-related cognitive decline and independence.  In our recent manuscript in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience we review the structural changes observed in brains of older adults that occur with slowed processing speed.  The most consistently observed structural [...]