Karagiorgis Alexandros T, Chalas Nikolas, Karagianni Maria, Papadelis Georgios, Vivas Ana B, Bamidis Panagiotis, Paraskevopoulos Evangelos
School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
School of Music Studies, Faculty of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2021 Sep 10;15:742607. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.742607. eCollection 2021.
Incoming information from multiple sensory channels compete for attention. Processing the relevant ones and ignoring distractors, while at the same time monitoring the environment for potential threats, is crucial for survival, throughout the lifespan. However, sensory and cognitive mechanisms often decline in aging populations, making them more susceptible to distraction. Previous interventions in older adults have successfully improved resistance to distraction, but the inclusion of multisensory integration, with its unique properties in attentional capture, in the training protocol is underexplored. Here, we studied whether, and how, a 4-week intervention, which targets audiovisual integration, affects the ability to deal with task-irrelevant unisensory deviants within a multisensory task. Musically naïve participants engaged in a computerized music reading game and were asked to detect audiovisual incongruences between the pitch of a song's melody and the position of a disk on the screen, similar to a simplistic music staff. The effects of the intervention were evaluated via behavioral and EEG measurements in young and older adults. Behavioral findings include the absence of age-related differences in distraction and the indirect improvement of performance due to the intervention, seen as an amelioration of response bias. An asymmetry between the effects of auditory and visual deviants was identified and attributed to modality dominance. The electroencephalographic results showed that both groups shared an increase in activation strength after training, when processing auditory deviants, located in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A functional connectivity analysis revealed that only young adults improved flow of information, in a network comprised of a fronto-parietal subnetwork and a multisensory temporal area. Overall, both behavioral measures and neurophysiological findings suggest that the intervention was indirectly successful, driving a shift in response strategy in the cognitive domain and higher-level or multisensory brain areas, and leaving lower level unisensory processing unaffected.
来自多个感官通道的传入信息会争夺注意力。在整个生命周期中，处理相关信息并忽略干扰因素，同时监测环境中的潜在威胁，对生存至关重要。然而，感官和认知机制在老年人群中往往会衰退，使他们更容易受到干扰。先前针对老年人的干预措施已成功提高了抗干扰能力，但在训练方案中纳入具有注意力捕捉独特特性的多感官整合却未得到充分探索。在这里，我们研究了一项为期4周、针对视听整合的干预措施是否以及如何影响在多感官任务中处理与任务无关的单感官偏差的能力。没有音乐基础的参与者参与了一个计算机化的音乐阅读游戏，并被要求检测歌曲旋律的音高与屏幕上圆盘位置之间的视听不一致，类似于一个简化的乐谱。通过对年轻人和老年人的行为和脑电图测量来评估干预效果。行为学发现包括在干扰方面不存在与年龄相关的差异，以及由于干预导致的表现间接改善，表现为反应偏差的改善。确定了听觉和视觉偏差效应之间的不对称性，并将其归因于模态优势。脑电图结果表明，两组在处理位于左侧背外侧前额叶皮层的听觉偏差时，训练后激活强度均增加。功能连接分析表明，只有年轻人在由额顶叶子网和多感官颞区组成的网络中改善了信息流动。总体而言，行为测量和神经生理学发现均表明，干预间接成功，推动了认知领域和更高层次或多感官脑区反应策略的转变，而较低层次的单感官处理未受影响。
