Higgen Focko L, Heine Charlotte, Krawinkel Lutz, Göschl Florian, Engel Andreas K, Hummel Friedhelm C, Xue Gui, Gerloff Christian
Department of Neurology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2020 Mar 17;12:74. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074. eCollection 2020.
One of the pivotal challenges of aging is to maintain independence in the activities of daily life. In order to adapt to changes in the environment, it is crucial to continuously process and accurately combine simultaneous input from different sensory systems, i.e., crossmodal or multisensory integration. With aging, performance decreases in multiple domains, affecting bottom-up sensory processing as well as top-down control. However, whether this decline leads to impairments in crossmodal interactions remains an unresolved question. While some researchers propose that crossmodal interactions degrade with age, others suggest that they are conserved or even gain compensatory importance. To address this question, we compared the behavioral performance of older and young participants in a well-established crossmodal matching task, requiring the evaluation of congruency in simultaneously presented visual and tactile patterns. Older participants performed significantly worse than young controls in the crossmodal task when being stimulated at their individual unimodal visual and tactile perception thresholds. Performance increased with adjustment of stimulus intensities. This improvement was driven by better detection of congruent stimulus pairs, while the detection of incongruent pairs was not significantly enhanced. These results indicate that age-related impairments lead to poor performance in complex crossmodal scenarios and demanding cognitive tasks. Crossmodal congruency effects attenuate the difficulties of older adults in visuotactile pattern matching and might be an important factor to drive the benefits of older adults demonstrated in various crossmodal integration scenarios. Congruency effects might, therefore, be used to develop strategies for cognitive training and neurological rehabilitation.
衰老的关键挑战之一是在日常生活活动中保持独立。为了适应环境变化，持续处理并准确整合来自不同感觉系统的同时输入，即跨通道或多感觉整合，至关重要。随着年龄增长，多个领域的表现会下降，影响自下而上的感觉处理以及自上而下的控制。然而，这种下降是否会导致跨通道交互受损仍是一个未解决的问题。一些研究人员提出跨通道交互会随着年龄增长而退化，另一些人则认为它们得以保留甚至具有补偿性重要性。为了解决这个问题，我们在一个成熟的跨通道匹配任务中比较了老年和年轻参与者的行为表现，该任务要求评估同时呈现的视觉和触觉模式的一致性。当以个体单通道视觉和触觉感知阈值进行刺激时，老年参与者在跨通道任务中的表现明显比年轻对照组差。随着刺激强度的调整，表现有所提高。这种改善是由对一致刺激对的更好检测驱动的，而对不一致刺激对的检测没有显著增强。这些结果表明，与年龄相关的损伤会导致在复杂的跨通道场景和高要求认知任务中的表现不佳。跨通道一致性效应减轻了老年人在视觉触觉模式匹配中的困难，可能是推动老年人在各种跨通道整合场景中表现出优势的一个重要因素。因此，一致性效应可用于制定认知训练和神经康复策略。
