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  4. Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching
 
research article

Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching

Higgen, Focko L.
•
Heine, Charlotte
•
Krawinkel, Lutz
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March 17, 2020
Frontiers In Aging Neuroscience

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.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074
Web of Science ID

WOS:000525547400001

Author(s)
Higgen, Focko L.
Heine, Charlotte
Krawinkel, Lutz
Goeschl, Florian
Engel, Andreas K.
Hummel, Friedhelm C.  
Xue, Gui
Gerloff, Christian
Date Issued

2020-03-17

Published in
Frontiers In Aging Neuroscience
Volume

12

Start page

74

Subjects

Geriatrics & Gerontology

•

Neurosciences

•

Geriatrics & Gerontology

•

Neurosciences & Neurology

•

aging

•

elderly

•

integration

•

multisensory

•

rehabilitation

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audiovisual temporal discrimination

•

multisensory integration

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2-point discrimination

•

selective attention

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speech-perception

•

age

•

vision

•

hearing

•

touch

•

correspondences

Note

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
UPHUMMEL  
Available on Infoscience
April 25, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/168377
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