Simultaneity and Temporal Order Judgments Are Coded Differently and Change With Age: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

Multisensory integration is required for a number of daily living tasks where the inability to accurately identify simultaneity and temporality of multisensory events results in errors in judgment leading to poor decision-making and dangerous behavior. Previously, our lab discovered that older adults exhibited impaired timing of audiovisual events, particularly when making temporal order judgments (TOJs). Simultaneity judgments (SJs), however, were preserved across the lifespan. Here, we investigate the difference between the TOJ and SJ tasks in younger and older adults to assess neural processing differences between these two tasks and across the lifespan. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were studied to determine between-task and between-age differences. Results revealed task specific differences in perceiving simultaneity and temporal order, suggesting that each task may be subserved via different neural mechanisms. Here, auditory N1 and visual P1 ERP amplitudes confirmed that unisensory processing of audiovisual stimuli did not differ between the two tasks within both younger and older groups, indicating that performance differences between tasks arise either from multisensory integration or higher-level decision-making. Compared to younger adults, older adults showed a sustained higher auditory N1 ERP amplitude response across SOAs, suggestive of broader response properties from an extended temporal binding window. Our work provides compelling evidence that different neural mechanisms subserve the SJ and TOJ tasks and that simultaneity and temporal order perception are coded differently and change with age.

Sensory- and memory-related drivers for altered ventriloquism effects and aftereffects in older adults

“…Previous studies reported a number of changes in multisensory perception with age. For example, OA seemed to benefit more from multisensory compared to unisensory information during speeded detections (Laurienti et al, 2006;Mahoney et al, 2014;Zou et al, 2017), had longer temporal binding windows (Basharat et al, 2018;Chan et al, 2014b;DeLoss et al, 2013;Hay-McCutcheon et al, 2009;Noel et al, 2016), experienced increased difficulty to segregate multisensory stimuli (Setti et al, 2011), and more strongly fused audio-visual speech (Sekiyama et al, 2014;Setti et al, 2013). Contrasting this view, recent work suggests that healthy young and aging brains may follow similar computational rules when combining multisensory information (Billino & Drewing, 2018;Campos et al, 2018;Cressman et al, 2010;Jones et al, 2019), except possibly that the OA may take longer to respond as a result of agerelated slowness (Jones et al, 2019.…”

Neural correlates of subjective timing precision and confidence

“…For instance, a broad network of cortical structures has been implicated in AV timing perception 17 , as has activity with a surprisingly short latency post stimulation (~45 ms) 18,19 . Evidence also suggests that different timing decisions rely on different substrates 20 . Our focus on the precision of AV timing judgments extends the scope of these investigations, and they may have more general implications, for precision in other sensory contexts.…”

Ventriloquist Illusion Produced With Virtual Acoustic Spatial Cues and Asynchronous Audiovisual Stimuli in Both Young and Older Individuals

“…Aging is often accompanied with age-related changes in sensory (e.g., hearing impairment) and cognitive capabilities (e.g., working memory, processing speed), both of which can affect mechanisms of multisensory integration. Multisensory integration is considered to be closely linked to the ability to conduct activities of daily living, especially for older individuals (de Dieuleveult et al, 2017;Basharat et al, 2018; and see, for example, for balance and falling, Mahoney et al, 2014;Setti et al, 2011). Therefore, the search for practical, applicable, and effective tests for multisensory integration, which can be implemented in clinical settings, continues (e.g., de Dieuleveult et al, 2019).…”