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Updated: Mar 31, 2026
Author Spotlight: Advancements in Impedance Monitoring for Cochlear Implant Surgery
Published on: August 4, 2023
Short-Term and Working Memory Impairments in Early-Implanted, Long-Term Cochlear Implant Users Are Independent of
Angela M AuBuchon1, David B Pisoni, William G Kronenberger
11Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA; and 2Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
Objective:
To determine whether early-implanted, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users display delays in verbal short-term and working memory capacity when processes related to audibility and speech production are eliminated.
Design:
Twenty-three long-term CI users and 23 normal-hearing controls each completed forward and backward digit span tasks under testing conditions that differed in presentation modality (auditory or visual) and response output (spoken recall or manual pointing).
Results:
Normal-hearing controls reproduced more lists of digits than the CI users, even when the test items were presented visually and the responses were made manually via touchscreen response.
Conclusions:
Short-term and working memory delays observed in CI users are not due to greater demands from peripheral sensory processes such as audibility or from overt speech-motor planning and response output organization. Instead, CI users are less efficient at encoding and maintaining phonological representations in verbal short-term memory using phonological and linguistic strategies during memory tasks.
