Age-equivalent Top–Down Modulation during Cross-modal Selective Attention

Abstract

Selective attention involves top-down modulation of sensory cortical areas, such that responses to relevant information are enhanced whereas responses to irrelevant information are suppressed. Suppression of irrelevant information, unlike enhancement of relevant information, has been shown to be deficient in aging. Although these attentional mechanisms have been well characterized within the visual modality, little is known about these mechanisms when attention is selectively allocated across sensory modalities. The present EEG study addressed this issue by testing younger and older participants in three different tasks: Participants attended to the visual modality and ignored the auditory modality, attended to the auditory modality and ignored the visual modality, or passively perceived information presented through either modality. We found overall modulation of visual and auditory processing during cross-modal selective attention in both age groups. Top-down modulation of visual processing was observed as a trend toward enhancement of visual information in the setting of auditory distraction, but no significant suppression of visual distraction when auditory information was relevant. Top-down modulation of auditory processing, on the other hand, was observed as suppression of auditory distraction when visual stimuli were relevant, but no significant enhancement of auditory information in the setting of visual distraction. In addition, greater visual enhancement was associated with better recognition of relevant visual information, and greater auditory distractor suppression was associated with a better ability to ignore auditory distraction. There were no age differences in these effects, suggesting that when relevant and irrelevant information are presented through different sensory modalities, selective attention remains intact in older age.

Effects of Aging in Multisensory Integration: A Systematic Review

“…Some authors used a simple unimodal or bimodal detection task (Townsend et al, 2006; Peiffer et al, 2007; Hugenschmidt et al, 2009a). Other authors investigated reaction times during unimodal or bimodal localization tasks (Hugenschmidt et al, 2009b; Campbell et al, 2010; Stephen et al, 2010; Dobreva et al, 2012; Wu et al, 2012) with spatial cueing (Guerreiro et al, 2012) or using peripheral vision (Cui et al, 2010; Dobreva et al, 2012) or the ability to remember or localize a stimulus in one modality while ignoring another modality (Diederich et al, 2008; Guerreiro et al, 2014, 2015). Other authors used judgment tasks; audiovisual temporal order judgment task (Setti et al, 2011b; de Boer-Schellekens and Vroomen, 2013; Fiacconi et al, 2013), audiovisual asynchrony judgment (Chan et al, 2014a) or audiovisual n -back task (Guerreiro and Van Gerven, 2011; Guerreiro et al, 2013).…”

“…In other words: OA used all audiovisual information present in the environment (Townsend et al, 2006; Peiffer et al, 2007; Diederich et al, 2008; Hugenschmidt et al, 2009b; Stephen et al, 2010; Guerreiro et al, 2012, 2014, 2015; Wu et al, 2012; DeLoss et al, 2013). Both groups showed better performance in multisensory tasks compared to unimodal tasks but OA seemed to benefit more from enriched multisensory information than YA (Diederich et al, 2008; Hugenschmidt et al, 2009b; de Boer-Schellekens and Vroomen, 2013; DeLoss et al, 2013; Guerreiro et al, 2014, 2015). When performing detection tasks, OA showed similar responses to MSI as YA (Townsend et al, 2006; Hugenschmidt et al, 2009a,b; Guerreiro et al, 2012, 2014, 2015; Fiacconi et al, 2013) or even faster responses to multisensory information compared to YA (Peiffer et al, 2007).…”

Increased Early Processing of Task-Irrelevant Auditory Stimuli in Older Adults

“…Interestingly, the differential impact of unimodal versus cross-modal tests of age-related changes in selective attention has been highlighted by Guerreiro and colleagues [86, 87]. They have contested the universality of the inhibitory deficit hypothesis, arguing that it does not apply to cross-modal paradigms, especially those in which auditory stimuli are presented in the to-be-ignored channel.…”

A Cognitive Framework for Understanding and Improving Interference Resolution in the Brain

“…Neural data in the audiovisual paradigm, however, suggest that while older adults on average perform as well as younger adults, only high-performing older adults exhibit preserved neural signatures with aging. An audiovisual WM task version with irrelevant stimuli from the auditory modality interleaved between relevant visual stimuli or vice versa also did not reveal an age-related cross-modal suppression deficit (Guerreiro et al, submitted for publication). In general, evidence from these studies agrees with prior cross-modal research in aging, which consistently demonstrates preserved multisensory performance in aging in the face of unisensory cognitive decline, notably in the visual domain (Hugenschmidt et al, 2009a, 2009b; Laurienti et al, 2006).…”