Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to assess the temporal processing and speech perception abilities in older adults who were practicingmeditation for more than five years. Participants were comprised of three groups, 30 young adults (“YA”) in the age range of 20–30years, 30 older adults in the age range of 50–65 years who practiced meditation for a period of five years or more (effective meditators“EM”), and 51 age matched older adults who did not have any experience of meditation (non-meditators “NM”). Temporalprocessing was evaluated using gap detection in noise, duration discrimination, modulation detection, and backward maskingand duration pattern tests. Speech perception was measured in presence of a four-talker babble at?5dBsignaltonoiseratioandwith the vocoded stimuli. Results revealed that EM group performed significantly better than NM group in all psychophysical andspeech perception tasks except in gap detection task. In the gap detection task, two groups did not differ significantly. Furthermore,EM group showed significantly better modulation detection thresholds compared to YA. Results of the study demonstrate that thepractice of meditation not only offsets the decline in temporal and speech processing abilities due to aging process but also improvesthe ability to perceive the modulations compared to young adults.