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Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching
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 integr...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7090137/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32256341 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074 |
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author | Higgen, Focko L. Heine, Charlotte Krawinkel, Lutz Göschl, Florian Engel, Andreas K. Hummel, Friedhelm C. Xue, Gui Gerloff, Christian |
author_facet | Higgen, Focko L. Heine, Charlotte Krawinkel, Lutz Göschl, Florian Engel, Andreas K. Hummel, Friedhelm C. Xue, Gui Gerloff, Christian |
author_sort | Higgen, Focko L. |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7090137 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-70901372020-03-31 Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching Higgen, Focko L. Heine, Charlotte Krawinkel, Lutz Göschl, Florian Engel, Andreas K. Hummel, Friedhelm C. Xue, Gui Gerloff, Christian Front Aging Neurosci 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. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-03-17 /pmc/articles/PMC7090137/ /pubmed/32256341 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074 Text en Copyright © 2020 Higgen, Heine, Krawinkel, Göschl, Engel, Hummel, Xue and Gerloff. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Higgen, Focko L. Heine, Charlotte Krawinkel, Lutz Göschl, Florian Engel, Andreas K. Hummel, Friedhelm C. Xue, Gui Gerloff, Christian Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching |
title | Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching |
title_full | Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching |
title_fullStr | Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching |
title_full_unstemmed | Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching |
title_short | Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching |
title_sort | crossmodal congruency enhances performance of healthy older adults in visual-tactile pattern matching |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7090137/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32256341 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2020.00074 |
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