A Listening behaviour at a given timepoint is shaped by an individuals’ sensory and neural functioning. Increased age decreases listening behaviour both directly, and indirectly via age-related hearing loss. Listening behaviour is supported by better neural filtering ability, independently of age and hearing acuity. B Conceptual depiction of how two-year changes along the neural (blue) and behavioural (red) domain may be related. Left, Thin coloured lines show individual trajectories across the adult lifespan, thick lines and black arrows highlight two-year changes in a single individual. Right, Across individuals, co-occurring changes in the neural and behavioural domain may be correlated (top) or independent of one another (bottom). C Schematic diagram highlighting the key research questions and how they are addressed in the current study using latent change score modelling.

A Longitudinal cohort of healthy middle-aged and older adults measured twice, two years apart. Circles represent individual participants at a given measurement time (dark grey: timepoint (T) 1, light grey: T2, white: drop-outs after T1). Bottom, Age distribution at T1 and T2 across 5-year bins. B Left, T1 air conduction hearing thresholds per individual (thin grey lines) and age group (thick coloured lines). Note that for didactic purposes, throughout the manuscript, thresholds are expressed as –dB HL to highlight the decrease in hearing acuity with age (left). Right, Pure-tone average hearing acuity (0.5, 1, 2, and 4kHz across both ears; higher is better) negatively correlates with age (r=–.43, p=3.73×1016). C Participants listened to two sentences presented simultaneously to the left and right ear. In 50 % of trials, a preceding visual cue indicated the to-be-attended target sentence. Listening behaviour is quantified via the accuracy and speed in identifying the final word of the target sentence. D Left, neural speech tracking as a proxy of an individual’s neural filtering ability. Stimulus envelopes of attended and ignored sentences were reconstructed from source-localized EEG activity in auditory cortex (see Methods for details) and correlated with the actual envelopes. Right, Better neural filtering results from stronger neural tracking of attended compared to ignored speech. We analysed neural filtering derived from the entire sentence presentation period.

Cross-sectional and longitudinal change along the auditory sensory (A), neural (B), and behavioural (C, D) domain. For each domain, coloured vectors (colour-coding four age groups for illustrative purposes, only) in the respective left subpanels show an individual’s change from T1 to T2 along with the cross-sectional trend plus 95% confidence interval (CI) separately for T1 (dark grey) and T2 (light grey). Top right subpanels: correlation of T1 and T2 as measure of test-retest reliability along with the 45° line (grey) and individual data points (black circles). Bottom right panels: Mean longitudinal change per age group (coloured vectors) and grand mean change (grey). Note that accuracy is expressed here as proportion correct for illustrative purposes, but was analysed logit-transformed or by applying generalized linear models.

Longitudinal stability of sensory and neural determinants of listening behaviour. Causal mediation analysis of age, hearing acuity, and neural filtering on response speed (A) and logit-transformed accuracy (B). Graphs next to each path indicate standardised coefficients plus 95% CIs separately for the full dataset (black), T1 (dark grey), and T2 (light grey). We did not find any significant modulation of the observed effects with time (see text for results). C Neural filtering strength was found to be predictive of accuracy at the single-trial level at both T1 (top) and T2 (bottom). Grey lines show individual effects, blue thick line shows the group-level fixed effect along with 95 % confidence interval. OR=odds ratio, ** p<.01.

A Univariate latent change score models for response speed (left) and neural filtering (right). All paths denoted with Latin letters refer to freely estimated but constrained to be equal parameters of the respective measurement models. Greek letters refer to freely estimated parameters of the structural model. Highlighted in black is the estimated mean longitudinal change from T1 to T2. B Latent change score model (LCSM) relating two-year changes in neural filtering strength to changes in response speed. Black arrows indicate paths or covariances of interest. Solid black arrows reflect freely estimated and statistically significant effects, dashed black arrows reflect non-significant effects. All estimates are standardised. Grey arrows show paths that were freely estimated or fixed as part of the structural model but that did not relate to the main research questions. For visual clarity, manifest indicators of the measurement model and all symbols relating to the estimated mean structure are omitted but are identical to those shown in panel A. ***p<.001, **p<.01, *p<.05, ✝p=.08. C Scatterplots of model-predicted factor scores that refer to the highlighted paths in panel B. Top panel shows that baseline-level neural filtering did not predict two-year change in behavioural functioning, bottom panel shows the absence of a significant change-change correlation.