The effects of aging on the processing of rising-intensity tonal and speech stimuli

The effects of aging in the cortical processing of auditory stimuli were studied using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) and long-duration stimuli slowly rising in intensity. The stimuli were 750-ms sinusoids or speech sounds. The two subject groups (N = 9 + 9) studied were, on the average, 61 and 24 years of age. It was found that aging results in considerable delays in averaged transient brain activity.