Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, LNC UMR 7291, 3 place Victor Hugo, 13331, Marseille, France.
McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 4;11(1):5124. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-84581-3.
Combining multisensory sources is crucial to interact with our environment, especially for older people who are facing sensory declines. Here, we examined the influence of textured sounds on haptic exploration of artificial textures in healthy younger and older adults by combining a tactile device (ultrasonic display) with synthetized textured sounds. Participants had to discriminate simulated textures with their right index while they were distracted by three disturbing, more or less textured sounds. These sounds were presented as a real-time auditory feedback based on finger movement sonification and thus gave the sensation that the sounds were produced by the haptic exploration. Finger movement velocity increased across both groups in presence of textured sounds (Rubbing or Squeaking) compared to a non-textured (Neutral) sound. While young adults had the same discrimination threshold, regardless of the sound added, the older adults were more disturbed by the presence of the textured sounds with respect to the Neutral sound. Overall, these findings suggest that irrelevant auditory information was taken into account by all participants, but was appropriately segregated from tactile information by young adults. Older adults failed to segregate auditory information, supporting the hypothesis of general facilitation of multisensory integration with aging.
将多种感觉来源结合起来对于与我们的环境进行交互至关重要，特别是对于面临感官衰退的老年人。在这里，我们通过将触觉设备（超声波显示器）与合成纹理声音相结合，研究了纹理声音对健康年轻和年长成年人触觉探索人工纹理的影响。参与者必须用他们的右食指辨别模拟纹理，同时被三个干扰性的、或多或少具有纹理的声音分散注意力。这些声音作为基于手指运动声音合成的实时听觉反馈呈现，从而给人一种声音是由触觉探索产生的感觉。与非纹理（中性）声音相比，在有纹理声音（摩擦或吱吱声）存在的情况下，两组参与者的手指运动速度都有所增加。虽然年轻成年人无论添加何种声音，其辨别阈值都相同，但与中性声音相比，年长成年人更容易受到纹理声音的干扰。总的来说，这些发现表明，所有参与者都考虑了无关的听觉信息，但年轻成年人将其与触觉信息适当分离。老年人无法将听觉信息分离出来，这支持了随着年龄的增长，多感官整合普遍得到促进的假设。
