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MCW seeks participants for study on auditory attention and aging

By Maureen Mack

June 13, 2014

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The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) is recruiting participants for a study that focuses on auditory attention and hearing. The study will investigate age-related differences in attention, with the goal of learning more about how specific neural mechanisms are compromised during focused tasks or divided attention.

Merav Sabri, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology at MCW, is the investigator conducting the research.

Studies have shown cognitive declines as healthy adults grow older in various areas including attention, working memory, and speech communication.

The study is open to healthy adults, ages 18-40 and 60-80, who are native English speakers with intact speech perception, and without known hearing loss, cognitive impairment, attention deficit, or neurological/psychiatric disorders.
Eligible participants will be trained on an attention task involving various sounds. The training session will be followed by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session. FMRI allows researchers to obtain images of the brain while participants perform various tasks. The images show which areas of the brain are “working” the hardest. The fMRI scan does not involve radiation or injected dyes.

The studies are conducted at the Medical College during the day and evenings. Participants will need to come to the Medical College for two sessions, each lasting one to three hours. They will be compensated for their time.

For further details, please contact Dr. Sabri at msabri@mcw.edu or (414) 955-4482. To enroll in the study, please go to https://fmri.mcw.edu/ and select ENROLLMENT. To select this specific study, type Aging-Attention under “other”.

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