Auditory Skills and Cognitive Functions in Adult Hearing Aid Users: A Cross-Sectional Observational Comparison Study

This study aimed to evaluate learning and memory functions in adults using hearing aids (HA) and examine their relationship with auditory skills.

The study group consisted of 32 adults aged 30-59 years with bilateral symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss who had used bilateral HA for at least 1 year. The control group included 32 age-matched normal-hearing (NH) individuals. Participants completed the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), Visual Aural Digit Span Test-Form B (VADS-B), Spectral-Temporally Modulated Ripple Test (SMRT), Random Gap Detection Test (RGDT), Matrix Sentence Test (MST), and Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ).

HA users showed significantly poorer suprathreshold auditory performance than controls across all auditory measures (all p < 0.001; ηp ² ranging from 0.417 to 0.763). However, no overall group differences were observed in memory performance (p = 0.237, ηp ² = 0.110). Group scores were similar for verbal learning, delayed recall, recognition, and visual short-term memory (p > 0.05), whereas HA users performed lower only in auditory short-term memory (p = 0.019, ηp ² = 0.087), although this finding was not robust after correction for multiple comparisons. Within the HA group, age explained a substantial proportion of variance in auditory-verbal memory performance (R ² = 0.587, p < 0.001), and auditory abilities provided an additional contribution to the explained variance after controlling for age (ΔR ² = 0.149). No significant auditory-memory relationships were found in NH adults.

Memory performance was generally preserved in HA users despite marked auditory processing deficits, with a selective, but exploratory, pattern suggesting a potential vulnerability in auditory short-term memory. The association between auditory processing and auditory-verbal memory observed only in HA users suggests that degraded auditory input may be associated with differences in memory performance even when audibility is supported by amplification, highlighting the potentially modality-specific nature of auditory-cognitive interactions.

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