Auditory Biases in Cognitive Assessment: Insights from a Hearing-Loss Simulation for the Screening of Dementia due to Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Cognitive-screening tests are used to detect pathological changes in mental abilities. Many use orally presented instructions and test items. Hence, hearing loss (HL), whose prevalence increases with age, may bias cognitive-test performance in the target population for the screening of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. To study the effect of the auditory test format, an impairment-simulation approach was used in normal-hearing listeners to compare performance on the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test, a memory task employed in dementia screening and research, when test items were unprocessed and processed to simulate age-related HL. Immediate verbal recall declined with simulated HL, suggesting that auditory factors are confounding variables in cognitive assessment and result in the underestimation of cognitive functioning.