Heft Marc W, Robinson Michael E
Department of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA,
Age (Dordr). 2014 Feb;36(1):1-8. doi: 10.1007/s11357-013-9536-9. Epub 2013 Apr 28.
While there is general agreement that vision and audition decline with aging, observations for the somatosensory senses and taste are less clear. The purpose of this study was to assess age differences in multimodal sensory perception in healthy, community-dwelling participants. Participants (100 females and 78 males aged 20-89 years) judged the magnitudes of sensations associated with graded levels of thermal, tactile, and taste stimuli in separate testing sessions using a cross-modality matching (CMM) procedure. During each testing session, participants also rated words that describe magnitudes of percepts associated with differing-level sensory stimuli. The words provided contextual anchors for the sensory ratings, and the word-rating task served as a control for the CMM. The mean sensory ratings were used as dependent variables in a MANOVA for each sensory domain, with age and sex as between-subject variables. These analyses were repeated with the grand means for the word ratings as a covariate to control for the rating task. The results of this study suggest that there are modest age differences for somatosensory and taste domains. While the magnitudes of these differences are mediated somewhat by age differences in the rating task, differences in warm temperature, tactile, and salty taste persist.
虽然人们普遍认为视觉和听觉会随着年龄增长而衰退，但关于体感和味觉的观察结果却不太明确。本研究的目的是评估健康的社区居住参与者在多模态感官知觉方面的年龄差异。参与者（100名女性和78名男性，年龄在20至89岁之间）在单独的测试环节中，使用跨模态匹配（CMM）程序判断与不同等级热、触觉和味觉刺激相关的感觉强度。在每个测试环节中，参与者还对描述与不同等级感官刺激相关的感知强度的词语进行评分。这些词语为感官评分提供了背景参照，而词语评分任务作为CMM的对照。在每个感官领域的多变量方差分析（MANOVA）中，将平均感官评分用作因变量，年龄和性别作为组间变量。以词语评分的总均值作为协变量重复这些分析，以控制评分任务。本研究结果表明，体感和味觉领域存在适度的年龄差异。虽然这些差异的程度在一定程度上由评分任务中的年龄差异介导，但温暖温度、触觉和咸味方面的差异仍然存在。
