Audiovisual Temporal Perception in Aging: The Role of Multisensory Integration and Age-Related Sensory Loss

Abstract

Within each sensory modality, age-related deficits in temporal perception contribute to the difficulties older adults experience when performing everyday tasks. Since perceptual experience is inherently multisensory, older adults also face the added challenge of appropriately integrating or segregating the auditory and visual cues present in our dynamic environment into coherent representations of distinct objects. As such, many studies have investigated how older adults perform when integrating temporal information across audition and vision. This review covers both direct judgments about temporal information (the sound-induced flash illusion, temporal order, perceived synchrony, and temporal rate discrimination) and judgments regarding stimuli containing temporal information (the audiovisual bounce effect and speech perception). Although an age-related increase in integration has been demonstrated on a variety of tasks, research specifically investigating the ability of older adults to integrate temporal auditory and visual cues has produced disparate results. In this short review, we explore what factors could underlie these divergent findings. We conclude that both task-specific differences and age-related sensory loss play a role in the reported disparity in age-related effects on the integration of auditory and visual temporal information.

Cross-modal interference-control is reduced in childhood but maintained in aging: A cohort study of stimulus- and response-interference in cross-modal and unimodal Stroop tasks.

“…Findings regarding the effect of aging on multisensory integration have been mixed (Brooks, Chan, Anderson, & Mckendrick, 2018). Some findings suggest enhanced multisensory integration in aging: Older adults appear more susceptible to multisensory illusions in which vision modulates audition (Sekiyama, Soshi, & Sakamoto, 2014) and vice versa (DeLoss, Pierce, & Andersen, 2013; Noel et al, 2016; Parker & Robinson, 2018), and manifest greater multisensory enhancement of response times (Laurienti et al, 2006).…”

“…Older adults have been shown to integrate information over wider (Bedard & Barnett-Cowan, 2016; Chan, Pianta, & Mckendrick, 2014; Noel et al, 2016) and similar (Bedard & Barnett-Cowan, 2016) time windows compared with younger adults depending on the task. A recent review of multisensory processing in aging highlighted the need to consider unisensory change when assessing multisensory integration in aging (Brooks et al, 2018). As such, within the current paper we control for differences in sensory ability while measuring cross-modal effects.…”

Supra-normal skills in processing of visuo-auditory prosodic information by cochlear-implanted deaf patients

“…While it was not the study's purpose, aging did not affect the multisensory benefit for visuo-auditory integration, since aged adults presented prosodic discrimination performances and VA gains, which were similar to the young ones. There are numerous and conflicting results concerning how aging affects multisensory interactions in temporal discrimination tasks unrelated to speech ( Brooks et al, 2018 ;DeLoss et al, 2013 ;Laurienti et al, 2006 ). When visuo-auditory speech processing was concerned, despite contradictory reports, it appears that elderly participants are more strongly influenced or biased by visual information in McGurk paradigms McGurk and MacDonald (1976) .…”

A Scoping Review of Audiovisual Integration Methodology: Screening for Auditory and Visual Impairment in Younger and Older Adults

“…With such a drastic shift in global demographics, the incidence of age-related chronic health conditions is also expected to increase. Indeed, the prevalence of audition and vision degradation increases with age and can have global impacts on cognition (Salthouse et al, 1996;Baltes and Lindenberger, 1997;Porto et al, 2016) and temporal perception (Gordon-Salant and Fitzgibbons, 1999;Grose and Mamo, 2010;de Boer-Schellekens and Vroomen, 2014;Brooks et al, 2018). Combining information across the senses can improve localization, discrimination, and speed of responses to objects, however, the central nervous system (CNS) must bind together the appropriate signals (Calvert et al, 2004).…”