Age-Related Changes in Sensorimotor Temporal Binding

Abstract

The causal relationship between a voluntary movement and a sensory event is crucial for experiencing agency. Sensory events must occur within a certain delay from a voluntary movement to be perceived as self-generated. Therefore, temporal sensitivity, i.e., the ability to discriminate temporal asynchronies between motor and sensory events, is important for sensorimotor binding. Moreover, differences in the physical propagation of external stimuli can sometimes challenge sensorimotor binding, generating illusory asynchrony. To overcome this problem, the brain adjusts the perceptual timing of sensory and motor events. This mechanism, named sensorimotor recalibration, helps keeping causality judgments accurate. As humans age, the broad decline in sensory and motor processing may reduce temporal sensitivity, and compromise sensorimotor recalibration. In the current study, we investigated the effect of aging on sensorimotor temporal binding by measuring changes in both temporal sensitivity and recalibration. Young and elderly adults were exposed to a prolonged physical delay between a voluntary movement (a keypress) and its perceptual consequence (a visual stimulus). Before and after this exposure, participants performed a sensorimotor temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. As expected, elderly adults showed reduced sensorimotor recalibration and sensitivity as compared to young adults, suggesting that aging affects sensorimotor temporal binding.

Sensory- and memory-related drivers for altered ventriloquism effects and aftereffects in older adults

“…Previous studies have described a wide range of apparent changes in multisensory behaviour with age (de Dieuleveult et al, 2017;Freiherr et al, 2013): older adults seem to benefit more from multisensory information during speeded detections (Diaconescu et al, 2013), they are influenced more by task-irrelevant distractors (Dobreva et al, 2012), have wider multisensory temporal binding windows (Bedard & Barnett-Cowan, 2016;Chan et al, 2014b;Colonius & Diederich, 2011;Diederich et al, 2008), and sacrifice response speed to preserve accuracy (Jones et al, 2019). Furthermore, the adaptation to audio-visual synchrony and the recalibration during temporal binding are both attenuated in older adults, possibly as a result of memory decline (Bedard & Barnett-Cowan, 2016;Chan et al, 2014a;Dobreva et al, 2012;Noel et al, 2016;Vercillo et al, 2017).…”

Perturbation-Induced Protective Arm Responses: Effect of Age, Perturbation-Intensity, and Relationship with Stepping Stability: A Pilot Study

“…For example, motor and sensory events (connected information for performing voluntary movement) that occur within a certain temporal window are bound together to determine accurate judgements about changing external environment. The binding ability of sensory and motor input is compromised with age, resulting in poor spatial sensorimotor adaptations during movement response [ 21 ]. In addition, reduction in conduction velocity of peripheral afferent and efferent nerves [ 22 ], decreased presynaptic modulation of Ia-afferent input to motoneurons for force and postural control [ 23 ], and greater requirement of corticospinal excitability to control the soleus muscle activity for maintaining upright posture [ 24 ], all likely contribute to the impaired modulation ability of balance perturbation responses.…”

Aging Impairs Temporal Sensitivity, but not Perceptual Synchrony, Across Modalities

“…The characterization of the response depended on the task: visual TOJ -proportion of "left first"; audiovisual TOJ -proportion of "flash first"; sensorimotor TOJ -proportion of "flash first". Individual data were then fit with a psychometric function and two parameters, the mean and the standard deviation, were estimated from the cumulative distribution (Weber, 1834;Fechner, 1860;van Eijk et al, 2008;Burr et al, 2009;Vercillo et al, 2017). The mean represented the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS), a measure of perceptual synchrony, and of the participant's bias in determining temporal judgments.…”

“…To assess sensorimotor timing, we employed a TOJ task adapted from Vercillo et al (2017). The motor action was a voluntary button press recorded via a CB6 response box that interfaced with the Display++.…”

“…Older adults also show deficits in unisensory temporal processing, such as in auditory duration discrimination (P J Fitzgibbons & Gordon-Salant, 1995;Peter J. Fitzgibbons & Gordon-Salant, 1994) and auditory temporal order judgements (Ulbrich, Churan, Fink, & Wittmann, 2009), and in visual gap detection (Humes et al, 2009) and visual temporal order judgements (Ulbrich et al, 2009;Busey et al, 2010). In the sensorimotor domain, temporal sensitivity (Vercillo et al, 2017), accuracy in predicting the time-course of observed actions (Diersch et al, 2012), and precise coordination and control of voluntary actions (Heuninckx et al, 2005;Seidler et al, 2010) are impaired with aging. Moreover, there is an increased visual reliance on balance in older adults (Jeka et al, 2010;Franz et al, 2015) and delays in visual feedback during postural control results in poorer performance in older compared to younger adults (Yeh et al, 2014).…”