The Genetic contribution to solving the cocktail-party problem

Abstract

Communicating in everyday situations requires solving the cocktail-party problem, or segregating the acoustic mixture into its constituent sounds and attending to those of most interest. Humans show dramatic variation in this ability, leading some to experience real-world problems irrespective of whether they meet criteria for clinical hearing loss. Here, we estimated the genetic contribution to cocktail-party listening by measuring speech-reception thresholds (SRTs) in 425 people from large families and ranging in age from 18 to 91 years. Roughly half the variance of SRTs was explained by genes (h ² = 0.567). The genetic correlation between SRTs and hearing thresholds (HTs) was medium (ρ _G = 0.392), suggesting that the genetic factors influencing cocktail-party listening were partially distinct from those influencing sound sensitivity. Aging and socioeconomic status also strongly influenced SRTs. These findings may represent a first step toward identifying genes for "hidden hearing loss," or hearing problems in people with normal HTs.

Keywords: Genetics; Health sciences; Human Genetics.

Graphical abstract

Figure 1

Decline of hearing abilities with advancing age (A) SRTs as a function of age. Red symbols are females; crosses are hearing-impaired listeners. The black line is the best fit from a robust linear regression and the shaded region is its 95% bootstrap confidence interval. To enhance visual clarity, SRTs have been truncated at 14.9 dB in this panel; however, the untruncated data were used in the robust linear regression. Furthermore, all variance component methods were performed on transformed variables (see main text) and therefore not affected by outliers. (B) BEA HTs as a function of age.

Figure 2

Influence of SES on hearing abilities (A) SRTs as a function of individual SES, as indexed by Hollingshead scores, where a greater score indicates higher SES. (B) BEA HTs as a function of individual SES. (C) SRTs as a function of neighborhood SES, as indexed by state-level ADIs, where a greater score indicates lower neighborhood SES. T enhance visual clarity, a small amount of random jitter was applied to ADIs in this panel; however, all analyses, including the robust regression, were performed on the pre-jittered data. (D) HTs as a function of neighborhood SES. In all panels, symbol shapes and colors, lines and shaded regions are consistent with Figure 1.