The Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center, Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2011 May;21(5):1042-55. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhq170. Epub 2010 Sep 16.
The integration of multisensory information is essential to forming meaningful representations of the environment. Adults benefit from related multisensory stimuli but the extent to which the ability to optimally integrate multisensory inputs for functional purposes is present in children has not been extensively examined. Using a cross-sectional approach, high-density electrical mapping of event-related potentials (ERPs) was combined with behavioral measures to characterize neurodevelopmental changes in basic audiovisual (AV) integration from middle childhood through early adulthood. The data indicated a gradual fine-tuning of multisensory facilitation of performance on an AV simple reaction time task (as indexed by race model violation), which reaches mature levels by about 14 years of age. They also revealed a systematic relationship between age and the brain processes underlying multisensory integration (MSI) in the time frame of the auditory N1 ERP component (∼ 120 ms). A significant positive correlation between behavioral and neurophysiological measures of MSI suggested that the underlying brain processes contributed to the fine-tuning of multisensory facilitation of behavior that was observed over middle childhood. These findings are consistent with protracted plasticity in a dynamic system and provide a starting point from which future studies can begin to examine the developmental course of multisensory processing in clinical populations.
多感官信息的整合对于形成环境的有意义表示至关重要。成年人受益于相关的多感官刺激，但儿童在多大程度上能够以最佳方式整合多感官输入以实现功能目的，尚未得到广泛研究。本研究采用横断面方法，结合行为测量，使用高密度脑电记录事件相关电位（ERP），从儿童中期到成年早期，对基本视听（AV）整合的神经发育变化进行了特征描述。数据表明，在视听简单反应时任务（如种族模型违反）中，多感官促进性能的逐渐微调（以种族模型违反为指标），大约在 14 岁时达到成熟水平。它们还揭示了年龄与多感官整合（MSI）的大脑过程之间的系统关系，在听觉 N1 ERP 成分的时间框架内（约 120ms）。MSI 的行为和神经生理测量之间存在显著的正相关，这表明潜在的大脑过程有助于观察到的儿童中期多感官促进行为的微调。这些发现与动态系统中的延长可塑性一致，并为未来的研究提供了起点，可以开始检查临床人群中多感官处理的发育过程。
