Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching.

Focko L Higgen,Christian Gerloff,Friedhelm C Hummel,Andreas K Engel,Florian Göschl,Charlotte Heine,Gui Xue,Lutz Krawinkel

doi:10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074

Abstract

One of the pivotal challenges of aging is to maintain independence in the activities of daily life. In order to adapt to changes in the environment, it is crucial to continuously process and accurately combine simultaneous input from different sensory systems, i.e., crossmodal or multisensory integration. With aging, performance decreases in multiple domains, affecting bottom-up sensory processing as well as top-down control. However, whether this decline leads to impairments in crossmodal interactions remains an unresolved question. While some researchers propose that crossmodal interactions degrade with age, others suggest that they are conserved or even gain compensatory importance. To address this question, we compared the behavioral performance of older and young participants in a well-established crossmodal matching task, requiring the evaluation of congruency in simultaneously presented visual and tactile patterns. Older participants performed significantly worse than young controls in the crossmodal task when being stimulated at their individual unimodal visual and tactile perception thresholds. Performance increased with adjustment of stimulus intensities. This improvement was driven by better detection of congruent stimulus pairs, while the detection of incongruent pairs was not significantly enhanced. These results indicate that age-related impairments lead to poor performance in complex crossmodal scenarios and demanding cognitive tasks. Crossmodal congruency effects attenuate the difficulties of older adults in visuotactile pattern matching and might be an important factor to drive the benefits of older adults demonstrated in various crossmodal integration scenarios. Congruency effects might, therefore, be used to develop strategies for cognitive training and neurological rehabilitation.

Highlights

As the percentage of older people in the population increases, aging-related declines gain more and more significance
While some authors report that the neurocomputational integration of multiple sensory stimuli degrades with age (e.g., Stine et al, 1990; Sommers et al, 2005; Stephen et al, 2010), others suggest that crossmodal integration is conserved or even gains compensatory importance in older adults (e.g., Laurienti et al, 2006; Peiffer et al, 2007; Diederich et al, 2008; Diaconescu et al, 2013)
This study aimed to investigate performance differences in visuotactile pattern matching between younger and healthy older adults

Summary

Introduction

As the percentage of older people in the population increases, aging-related declines gain more and more significance. In order to behave adequately in our natural environment, it is crucial to continuously process simultaneous input from different sensory systems and integrate this information into meaningful percepts (Meredith and Stein, 1983, 1986; Calvert, 2001; Spence, 2007). This crossmodal or multisensory integration (for definition see Calvert, 2001) complements unimodal sensory perception and allows for basing decisions and behavior on a broader range of sensory cues (Calvert et al, 2004). While some authors report that the neurocomputational integration of multiple sensory stimuli degrades with age (e.g., Stine et al, 1990; Sommers et al, 2005; Stephen et al, 2010), others suggest that crossmodal integration is conserved or even gains compensatory importance in older adults (e.g., Laurienti et al, 2006; Peiffer et al, 2007; Diederich et al, 2008; Diaconescu et al, 2013)

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