Edward Golob
University of Texas at San Antonio, TX·Psychology
People who score higher on tests of intelligence also tend to have sharper senses, and no one knows quite why. The link gets stronger as people get older, especially for hearing, which hints that something shared by perception and thinking declines with age.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
cognitive aging
auditory perception
hearing loss
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Test the common cause hypothesis by using structural equation modeling on batteries of hearing, attention and cognitive tests in young and older adults, asking whether attention control or attentional effort are shared mechanisms and how attention explains age differences.
- Relate multiple dimensions of listening effort to hearing and cognition using behavioral and psychophysiological measures of mental exertion in young and older adults.
- Evaluate the sensory deprivation hypothesis by using EEG to record auditory brainstem and cortical responses during passive listening that minimizes attention, and compare them with responses to the same sounds when actively attended.
- Compare the common cause and sensory deprivation hypotheses head-to-head with statistical modeling, testing the prediction that links between auditory processing and high-level cognition strengthen with age.
More about the research
Identifying what that shared something is matters clinically: hearing loss is one of the largest risk factors for dementia, raising relative risk by roughly 40%, and hearing aids greatly reduce that risk for reasons nobody has pinned down. This project tests two competing explanations in young and older adults, focusing in depth on hearing while also measuring vision and smell.
Why it matters
Hearing loss substantially raises dementia risk, and hearing aids lower it, but the mechanism is unknown; psychosocial side effects such as reduced loneliness explain little of it. Clarifying whether attention control or sensory deprivation links hearing and thinking could inform audiology practice by showing how cognition shapes hearing test results, which matters for older adults at risk of both declines. Findings may also bear on conditions marked by attention problems, including ADHD, autism, PTSD, schizophrenia and stroke.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ian Mertes
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Neuroscience
Determine whether medial olivocochlear (MOC) reflex strength, measured by contralateral inhibition of otoacoustic emissions, predicts whether normal-hearing adults report difficulty understanding speech in background noise.
Tian Zhao
University of Washington, WA·Neuroscience
Test whether infants with a family history of developmental language disorder show a longer sensitive period for speech learning than low-risk infants, by comparing brain responses at about 6, 12 and 14 months.
Hey-Kyoung Lee
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Determine how early- and late-onset visual deprivation changes three corticothalamic feedback pathways from auditory cortex (Ntsr1, Cplx3/Drd1a and Rbp4 neurons) in adult mice, using optogenetics.
The school
University of Texas at San Antonio: 10 labs on PI Pages, $172M a year on research, 129 research doctorates a year.
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