Abstract
While aging can lead to significant declines in perceptual and cognitive function, the effects of age on multisensory integration, the process in which the brain combines information across the senses, are less clear. Recent reports suggest that older adults are susceptible to the sound-induced flash illusion (Shams et al., 2000) across a much wider range of temporal asynchronies than younger adults (Setti et al., 2011). To assess whether this cost for multisensory integration is a general phenomenon of combining asynchronous audiovisual input, we compared the time courses of two variants of the sound-induced flash illusion in young and older adults: the fission illusion, where one flash accompanied by two beeps appears as two flashes, and the fusion illusion, where two flashes accompanied by one beep appear as one flash. Twenty-five younger (18–30 years) and older (65+ years) adults were required to report whether they perceived one or two flashes, whilst ignoring irrelevant auditory beeps, in bimodal trials where auditory and visual stimuli were separated by one of six stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). There was a marked difference in the pattern of results for the two variants of the illusion. In conditions known to produce the fission illusion, older adults were significantly more susceptible to the illusion at longer SOAs compared to younger participants. In contrast, the performance of the younger and older groups was almost identical in conditions known to produce the fusion illusion. This surprising difference between sound-induced fission and fusion in older adults suggests dissociable age-related effects in multisensory integration, consistent with the idea that these illusions are mediated by distinct neural mechanisms.
Highlights
The aging process is accompanied by a gradual decline in many aspects of perceptual function
Young participants experienced the sound-induced fission illusion when the auditory beep stimuli were separated by short intervals, but their performance improved with increasing stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), consistent with previous reports (Shams et al, 2002; Setti et al, 2011; Apthorp et al, 2013)
Whereas older adults were as susceptible to the illusion as younger adults at shorter SOAs (33–50 ms), they remained susceptible to the illusion even for the longest SOA presented between the auditory beeps
Summary
The aging process is accompanied by a gradual decline in many aspects of perceptual function. Whereas younger adults perceive this fission illusion only when the time interval between tones is relatively short (Shams et al, 2002), older adults are susceptible to this illusion across a much wider range of temporal asynchronies (Setti et al, 2011; Stapleton et al, 2014), presumably owing to an enlarged temporal window of integration (e.g., Diederich et al, 2008) This finding suggests that, under certain conditions, the integration of incongruous audiovisual signals leads to an age-related cost in perception. The extent of the temporal window of integration is known to vary with different stimuli and task demands (e.g., Vatakis and Spence, 2006; Stevenson and Wallace, 2013) and it may be that older adults display an enhanced susceptibility to some multisensory illusions, but not others
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