Ren Yanna, Li Hannan, Li Yan, Xu Zhihan, Luo Rui, Ping Hang, Ni Xuan, Yang Jiajia, Yang Weiping
Department of Psychology, College of Humanities and Management, Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guiyang, China.
University Science Park Management Center, Guiyang University, Guiyang, China.
Iperception. 2023 Feb 23;14(1):20416695231157348. doi: 10.1177/20416695231157348. eCollection 2023 Jan-Feb.
Previous studies have shown that attention influences audiovisual integration (AVI) in multiple stages, but it remains unclear how AVI interacts with attentional load. In addition, while aging has been associated with sensory-functional decline, little is known about how older individuals integrate cross-modal information under attentional load. To investigate these issues twenty older adults and 20 younger adults were recruited to conduct a dual task including a multiple object tracking (MOT) task, which manipulated sustained visual attentional load, and an audiovisual discrimination task, which assesses AVI. The results showed that response times were shorter and hit rate was higher for audiovisual stimuli than for auditory or visual stimuli alone and in younger adults than in older adults. The race model analysis showed that AVI was higher under the load_3 condition (monitoring two targets of the MOT task) than under any other load condition (no-load [NL], one or three targets monitoring). This effect was found regardless of age. However, AVI was lower in older adults than younger adults under NL condition. Moreover, the peak latency was longer, and the time window of AVI was delayed in older adults compared to younger adults under all conditions. These results suggest that slight visual sustained attentional load increased AVI but that heavy visual sustained attentional load decreased AVI, which supports the claim that attention resource was limited, and we further proposed that AVI was positively modulated by attentional resource. Finally, there were substantial impacts of aging on AVI; AVI was delayed in older adults.
以往的研究表明，注意力在多个阶段影响视听整合（AVI），但AVI如何与注意力负荷相互作用仍不清楚。此外，虽然衰老与感觉功能衰退有关，但对于老年人在注意力负荷下如何整合跨模态信息知之甚少。为了研究这些问题，招募了20名老年人和20名年轻人进行一项双重任务，包括一个操纵持续视觉注意力负荷的多目标跟踪（MOT）任务和一个评估AVI的视听辨别任务。结果表明，与单独的听觉或视觉刺激相比，视听刺激的反应时间更短，命中率更高，且年轻人的反应时间比老年人更短，命中率更高。竞争模型分析表明，在负荷3条件下（监测MOT任务的两个目标）的AVI高于在任何其他负荷条件下（无负荷[NL]、监测一个或三个目标）。无论年龄如何，都发现了这种效应。然而，在NL条件下，老年人的AVI低于年轻人。此外，在所有条件下，老年人的峰值潜伏期更长，AVI的时间窗口比年轻人延迟。这些结果表明，轻微的视觉持续注意力负荷增加了AVI，但重度的视觉持续注意力负荷降低了AVI，这支持了注意力资源有限的观点，我们进一步提出AVI受到注意力资源的正向调节。最后，衰老对AVI有显著影响；老年人的AVI延迟。
