Abstract
The rapid demographical shift occurring in our society implies that understanding of healthy aging and age-related diseases is one of our major future challenges. Sensory impairments have an enormous impact on our lives and are closely linked to cognitive functioning. Due to the inherent complexity of sensory perceptions, we are commonly presented with a complex multisensory stimulation and the brain integrates the information from the individual sensory channels into a unique and holistic percept. The cerebral processes involved are essential for our perception of sensory stimuli and becomes especially important during the perception of emotional content. Despite ongoing deterioration of the individual sensory systems during aging, there is evidence for an increase in, or maintenance of, multisensory integration processing in aging individuals. Within this comprehensive literature review on multisensory integration we aim to highlight basic mechanisms and potential compensatory strategies the human brain utilizes to help maintain multisensory integration capabilities during healthy aging to facilitate a broader understanding of age-related pathological conditions. Further our goal was to identify where further research is needed.
Highlights
MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION Each of our sensory systems provides us with a qualitatively distinct subjective complementary impression of our surrounding, which are of critical importance for perception, cognitive processing and control of action and can occur in a highly automatized manner (Meredith and Stein, 1983, 1985; Stein and Meredith, 1990)
Due to the inherent complexity of sensory perceptions, we are commonly presented with a complex multisensory stimulation and the brain integrates the information from the individual sensory channels into a unique and holistic percept
Multisensory integration during aging in humans consists primarily of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS); it has been suggested that the STS is associated with the integration and labeling of object identity, whereas the IPS is involved in a low-level spatial information processing (Calvert, 2001; Stein and Stanford, 2008)
Summary
MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION Each of our sensory systems provides us with a qualitatively distinct subjective complementary impression of our surrounding, which are of critical importance for perception, cognitive processing and control of action and can occur in a highly automatized manner (Meredith and Stein, 1983, 1985; Stein and Meredith, 1990). Research from our own and other groups provides evidence for a neural network involving the amygdala, insula, frontal areas, FG, and STS which are responsible for integration of cross- or multisensory information related to emotional perception during stimulation with dynamic stimulus material of different modalities (Ethofer et al, 2006; Kreifelts et al, 2009; Seubert et al, 2010a,b; Klasen et al, 2011, 2012; Muller et al, 2011, 2012; Regenbogen et al, 2012a,b). We further aim to identify areas where further research is needed in order to shed light onto the mechanisms of multisensory integration
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