Abstract
Previous studies confirmed that the cognitive resources are limited for each person, and perceptual load affects the detection of stimulus greatly; however, how the visual perceptual load influences audiovisual integration (AVI) is still unclear. Here, 20 older and 20 younger adults were recruited to perform an auditory/visual discrimination task under various visual perceptual-load conditions. The analysis for the response times revealed a significantly faster response to the audiovisual stimulus than to the visual stimulus or auditory stimulus (all p < 0.001), and a significantly slower response by the older adults than by the younger adults to all targets (all p ≤ 0.024). The race-model analysis revealed a higher AV facilitation effect for older (12.54%) than for younger (7.08%) adults under low visual perceptual-load conditions; however, no obvious difference was found between younger (2.92%) and older (3.06%) adults under medium visual perceptual-load conditions. Only the AV depression effect was found for both younger and older adults under high visual perceptual-load conditions. Additionally, the peak latencies of AVI were significantly delayed in older adults under all visual perceptual-load conditions. These results suggested that visual perceptual load decreased AVI (i.e., depression effects), and the AVI effect was increased but delayed for older adults.
Highlights
Individuals simultaneously receive many types of sensory information from the outside world, including visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory information; our brain can select and merge the available information to facilitate the perception of the outside world
The post hoc analysis using pairwise comparison with Bonferroni correction for perceptual load revealed that the accuracy was lower under high visual perceptual-load conditions than that under low (p = 0.004) and medium (p = 0.018) visual perceptual-load conditions, but there was no significant difference between the low and medium visual perceptual-load conditions (p = 1.000) for older adults
Under high visual perceptual-load conditions, only the AV depression effect was found in both older (−11.47%) and younger adults (−16.89%) (Figure 4C). These results indicated the audiovisual integration (AVI) was higher in older adults, and the facilitation effect was absent and even the depression effect occurred with an increase in the visual perceptual load for both older (Figure 5A) and younger (Figure 5B) adults
Summary
Individuals simultaneously receive many types of sensory information from the outside world, including visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory information; our brain can select and merge the available information to facilitate the perception of the outside world. When driving a car, it is necessary to watch the road condition (visual information), listen to the voice broadcast (auditory information), and operate the steering wheel (tactile information) simultaneously. The interactive processing of information from multiple sensory modalities is called multisensory integration. The procedure that merges visual and auditory information is defined as audiovisual integration (AVI), which assists individuals in identifying objects much more and is the topical issue of multisensory integration (Raab, 1962; Miller, 1982). Ordinary life is complex and AVI might be disturbed by
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