Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, 601 Elmwood Ave, Rochester, NY 14642-8603, USA.
Exp Brain Res. 2010 Oct;206(4):371-9. doi: 10.1007/s00221-010-2413-1. Epub 2010 Sep 21.
Vision and audition provide spatial information about the environment to guide natural behavior. Because the eyes move in the head while the ears remain head-fixed, input conveying eye position in the head is required to maintain audiovisual congruence. Human perception of auditory space was previously shown to shift with changes in eye position, regardless of the target's frequency content and spatial cues underlying horizontal and vertical localization. In this study, we examined whether this interaction is altered by advancing age. Head-restrained young (18-44 yo), middle-aged (45-64 yo), and elderly (65-81 yo) human subjects localized noise bursts under conditions of transient and sustained ocular deflection. All three age groups demonstrated a time-dependent shift of auditory space in the direction of eye position. Moreover, this adaptation showed a clear decline with advancing age, but only for peripheral auditory space (beyond ±10° from midline). Alternatively, adaptation in the periphery may occur, but is more sluggish than in the central field and therefore not fully observed in this experiment. The age-dependent effect cannot be readily explained by senescent peripheral hearing loss, suggesting a change in central processing of auditory space in relation to the control of gaze.
视觉和听觉为环境提供空间信息，以指导自然行为。由于眼睛在头部移动，而耳朵保持头部固定，因此需要输入传达头部中眼睛位置的信息，以保持视听一致性。先前的研究表明，无论目标的频率内容和水平与垂直定位的空间线索如何，听觉空间的感知都会随着眼睛位置的变化而变化。在这项研究中，我们研究了年龄增长是否会改变这种相互作用。头部固定的年轻（18-44 岁）、中年（45-64 岁）和老年（65-81 岁）人类受试者在瞬态和持续眼球偏转的条件下对噪声突发进行了定位。所有三个年龄组都表现出听觉空间随眼睛位置的时间依赖性偏移。此外，这种适应随着年龄的增长而明显下降，但仅在外围听觉空间（中线以外±10°）。或者，在周边可能会发生适应，但比在中央视野中更缓慢，因此在这个实验中没有完全观察到。年龄相关性效应不能用衰老的外围听力损失来解释，这表明与注视控制相关的听觉空间的中枢处理发生了变化。
