Auditory training and cognitive functioning in adult with traumatic brain injury

Auditory training (AT) is a set of strategies applied to develop or improve auditory abilities. Two mechanisms are involved in auditory processing: neurocognitive mechanisms of the acoustic signal itself, which are responsible for the discrimination and recognition of a specific function (‘‘bottom-up’’ processes), and attentional processes involving phenomena such as attention and memory (‘‘top-down’’ processes). Several studies have shown that auditory functions can be improved by stimulating those neurocognitive and attentional abilities. Nevertheless, it is not yet known whether AT can improve cognitive functioning. Although AT shares processes in common with cognition (such as attentional processes), it considers the processes as solely unimodal because only auditory stimuli are analyzed. This leads to the question of whether auditory training affects cognitive abilities. This paper describes the audiological and cognitive findings of an adult with traumatic brain injury (TBI) before and after AT.