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

TY - JOUR

T1 - Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching

AU - Higgen, Focko L.

AU - Heine, Charlotte

AU - Krawinkel, Lutz

AU - Göschl, Florian

AU - Engel, Andreas K.

AU - Hummel, Friedhelm C.

AU - Xue, Gui

AU - Gerloff, Christian

N1 - Funding Information: This article has been released as a pre-print at bioRxiv (Higgen et al., 2019). Funding. This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in project Crossmodal Learning, SFB TRR169/A3/B1/B4 and by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in project SFB 936/A3/C1/Z1. Publisher Copyright: © Copyright © 2020 Higgen, Heine, Krawinkel, Göschl, Engel, Hummel, Xue and Gerloff. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2020/3/17

Y1 - 2020/3/17

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - aging

KW - elderly

KW - integration

KW - multisensory

KW - rehabilitation

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85082665346&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074

DO - 10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074

M3 - SCORING: Journal article

C2 - 32256341

VL - 12

JO - FRONT AGING NEUROSCI

JF - FRONT AGING NEUROSCI

SN - 1663-4365

M1 - 74

ER -