Impairments of auditory scene analysis in posterior cortical atrophy

Although posterior cortical atrophy is often regarded as the canonical ‘visual dementia’, auditory symptoms may also be salient in this disorder. Patients often report particular difficulty hearing in busy environments; however, the core cognitive process—parsing of the auditory environment (‘auditory scene analysis’)—has been poorly characterized. In this cross-sectional study, we used customized perceptual tasks to assess two generic cognitive operations underpinning auditory scene analysis—sound source segregation and sound event grouping—in a cohort of 21 patients with posterior cortical atrophy, referenced to 15 healthy age-matched individuals and 21 patients with typical Alzheimer’s disease. After adjusting for peripheral hearing function and performance on control tasks assessing perceptual and executive response demands, patients with posterior cortical atrophy performed significantly worse on both auditory scene analysis tasks relative to healthy controls and patients with typical Alzheimer’s disease (all P < 0.05). Our findings provide further evidence of central auditory dysfunction in posterior cortical atrophy, with implications for our pathophysiological understanding of Alzheimer syndromes as well as clinical diagnosis and management.