Individual differences in seated resting heart rate are associated with multisensory perceptual function in older adults.

Abstract

There is evidence that cardiovascular function can influence sensory processing and cognition, which are known to change with age. However, whether the precision of unisensory and multisensory temporal perception is influenced by cardiovascular activity in older adults is uncertain. We examined whether seated resting heart rate (RHR) was associated with unimodal visual and auditory temporal discrimination as well as susceptibility to the audio-visual Sound Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI) in a large sample of older adults (N = 3232; mean age = 64.17 years, SD = 7.74, range = 50-93; 56% female) drawn from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Faster seated RHR was associated with better discretization of two flashes (but not two beeps) and increased SIFI susceptibility when the audio-visual stimuli were presented close together in time but not at longer audio-visual temporal offsets. Our findings suggest a significant relationship between cardiovascular activity and the precision of visual and audio-visual temporal perception in older adults, thereby providing novel evidence for a link between cardiovascular function and perceptual function in aging.