Ren Yanna, Yang Weiping, Nakahashi Kohei, Takahashi Satoshi, Wu Jinglong
Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education, Hubei University, Hubei, China.
Perception. 2017 Feb;46(2):205-218. doi: 10.1177/0301006616673850. Epub 2016 Oct 17.
Although neuronal studies have shown that audiovisual integration is regulated by temporal factors, there is still little knowledge about the impact of temporal factors on audiovisual integration in older adults. To clarify how stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between auditory and visual stimuli modulates age-related audiovisual integration, 20 younger adults (21-24 years) and 20 older adults (61-80 years) were instructed to perform an auditory or visual stimuli discrimination experiment. The results showed that in younger adults, audiovisual integration was altered from an enhancement (AV, A ± 50 V) to a depression (A ± 150 V). In older adults, the alterative pattern was similar to that for younger adults with the expansion of SOA; however, older adults showed significantly delayed onset for the time-window-of-integration and peak latency in all conditions, which further demonstrated that audiovisual integration was delayed more severely with the expansion of SOA, especially in the peak latency for V-preceded-A conditions in older adults. Our study suggested that audiovisual facilitative integration occurs only within a certain SOA range (e.g., -50 to 50 ms) in both younger and older adults. Moreover, our results confirm that the response for older adults was slowed and provided empirical evidence that integration ability is much more sensitive to the temporal alignment of audiovisual stimuli in older adults.
尽管神经元研究表明视听整合受时间因素调节，但关于时间因素对老年人视听整合的影响仍知之甚少。为了阐明听觉和视觉刺激之间的刺激开始异步性（SOA）如何调节与年龄相关的视听整合，20名年轻人（21 - 24岁）和20名老年人（61 - 80岁）被要求进行听觉或视觉刺激辨别实验。结果表明，在年轻人中，视听整合从增强（AV，A ± 50V）转变为抑制（A ± 150V）。在老年人中，随着SOA的扩大，这种变化模式与年轻人相似；然而，老年人在所有条件下的整合时间窗口和峰值潜伏期均出现明显延迟，这进一步表明随着SOA的扩大，视听整合延迟更为严重，尤其是在老年人中V先于A条件下的峰值潜伏期。我们的研究表明，在年轻人和老年人中，视听促进整合仅发生在特定的SOA范围内（例如，-50至50毫秒）。此外，我们的结果证实老年人的反应变慢，并提供了实证证据，即整合能力对老年人视听刺激的时间对齐更为敏感。
