Faculty of Health Sciences and Social Studies, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 29;17(7):e0271513. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271513. eCollection 2022.
It has been demonstrated earlier in healthy adult volunteers that visually and multisensory (audiovisual) guided equivalence learning are similarly effective. Thus, these processes seem to be independent of stimulus modality. The question arises as to whether this phenomenon can be observed also healthy children and adolescents. To assess this, visual and audiovisual equivalence learning was tested in 157 healthy participants younger than 18 years of age, in both a visual and an audiovisual paradigm consisting of acquisition, retrieval and generalization phases. Performance during the acquisition phase (building of associations), was significantly better in the multisensory paradigm, but there was no difference between the reaction times (RTs). Performance during the retrieval phase (where the previously learned associations are tested) was also significantly better in the multisensory paradigm, and RTs were significantly shorter. On the other hand, transfer (generalization) performance (where hitherto not learned but predictable associations are tested) was not significantly enhanced in the multisensory paradigm, while RTs were somewhat shorter. Linear regression analysis revealed that all the studied psychophysical parameters in both paradigms showed significant correlation with the age of the participants. Audiovisual stimulation enhanced acquisition and retrieval as compared to visual stimulation only, regardless of whether the subjects were above or below 12 years of age. Our results demonstrate that multisensory stimuli significantly enhance association learning and retrieval in the context of sensory guided equivalence learning in healthy children and adolescents. However, the audiovisual gain was significantly higher in the cohort below 12 years of age, which suggests that audiovisually guided equivalence learning is still in development in childhood.
先前在健康成年志愿者中已经证明，视觉和多感官（视听）引导的等价学习同样有效。因此，这些过程似乎独立于刺激模式。问题是这种现象是否也能在健康的儿童和青少年中观察到。为了评估这一点，在 157 名年龄在 18 岁以下的健康参与者中，在视觉和视听范式中测试了视觉和视听等价学习，这两种范式包括获取、检索和泛化阶段。在获取阶段（建立联想）期间的表现，在多感官范式中明显更好，但反应时间（RT）没有差异。在检索阶段（测试先前学习的联想）期间的表现，在多感官范式中也明显更好，RT 明显缩短。另一方面，在多感官范式中，转移（泛化）性能（测试迄今为止未学习但可预测的联想）并没有显著增强，而 RT 则略短。线性回归分析表明，两种范式中所有研究的心理物理参数都与参与者的年龄呈显著相关。与仅视觉刺激相比，视听刺激显著增强了获取和检索，无论受试者的年龄是否在 12 岁以上。我们的结果表明，在健康儿童和青少年的感觉引导等价学习中，多感官刺激可显著增强联想学习和检索。然而，12 岁以下组的视听增益明显更高，这表明视听引导的等价学习在儿童时期仍在发展中。
