Influence of cognitive functions on central auditory processing tests in university students.
Thaís Andreza Oliveira Barbosa, Sebastian Ariel Jimenez Cortes, Luciana Cássia de Jesus and 2 others
PMID 41919900WHAT IT FOUND
Central auditory processing test results were mostly unrelated to cognitive scores, but poor verbal fluency went with abnormal temporal resolution, and poor working memory and problem solving with abnormal dichotic listening, in 95 university students.
Four other auditory tests showed no link.
Key findings
01Cognitive test scores were not statistically significantly associated with four of the six central auditory processing tests used, namely speech in noise, pitch pattern sequence, duration pattern sequence and masking level difference, in either the chi-square tests or the logistic regression.
02Abnormal verbal fluency was the one cognitive variable that stayed linked to abnormal temporal resolution (random gap detection) once the other variables were accounted for, at about 4.7 times the odds. Attention had been linked to the same test before adjustment but did not remain in the model.
03Abnormal working memory and abnormal problem solving were each linked to abnormal dichotic digits results after adjustment, at about 8 times and 6.6 times the odds compared with students without those difficulties.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was one of convenience from a single institution and the number of participants was never calculated in advance, so the study could only detect fairly large associations if they existed. Abnormal cognitive results were rare. Attention was abnormal in only 2 of 95 students and dichotic digits in 9, so the three odds ratios rest on a handful of cases, and the confidence intervals are very wide, running up to 43.770 for working memory. The true association could be small or enormous. The study is cross-sectional. It shows that a poor cognitive score and a poor auditory test result occurred together in the same people, not that the cognitive difficulty caused the auditory result. Everyone in the study had normal hearing and normal middle-ear findings by design, so this says nothing about clients with hearing loss, middle-ear problems or other auditory pathology. Many comparisons were run across eight cognitive tasks and six auditory tests, and no adjustment for multiple testing is reported, so some of the significant results could be chance findings. Most participants were women (69 of 95) and all were Brazilian university students, so the pattern may not hold in other groups. Cognitive and auditory scores were also reduced to normal or abnormal, which discards how far from normal each person was.
Declared interests
The only declaration given is about funding, and it says there is nothing to declare, in English and repeated in Portuguese. No separate statement about competing interests appears.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use these odds to explain away a poor auditory processing result or to predict which clients will fail a test. Most of the auditory tests here were unrelated to any cognitive measure, and each significant odds ratio comes from only 9 to 13 abnormal test results, with confidence intervals reaching as high as 43.770 and no sample size calculated in advance. The study is cross-sectional, so it shows that two results occurred together in the same people at one point in time and cannot show that one caused the other.
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