Age-Related Declines in Early Sensory Memory: Identification of Rapid Auditory and Visual Stimulus Sequences

Abstract

Age-related temporal-processing declines of rapidly presented sequences may involve contributions of sensory memory. This study investigated recall for rapidly presented auditory (vowel) and visual (letter) sequences presented at six different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) that spanned threshold SOAs for sequence identification. Younger, middle-aged, and older adults participated in all tasks. Results were investigated at both equivalent performance levels (i.e., SOA threshold) and at identical physical stimulus values (i.e., SOAs). For four-item sequences, results demonstrated best performance for the first and last items in the auditory sequences, but only the first item for visual sequences. For two-item sequences, adults identified the second vowel or letter significantly better than the first. Overall, when temporal-order performance was equated for each individual by testing at SOA thresholds, recall accuracy for each position across the age groups was highly similar. These results suggest that modality-specific processing declines of older adults primarily determine temporal-order performance for rapid sequences. However, there is some evidence for a second amodal processing decline in older adults related to early sensory memory for final items in a sequence. This selective deficit was observed particularly for longer sequence lengths and was not accounted for by temporal masking.

Event-related brain potentials reveal age-related changes in parafoveal-foveal integration during sentence processing

“…Under this account, although parafoveal information is processed without major decrements in older adults, the parafoveal visual representation is not sustained to be carried over to foveal vision in such a way as to aid in subsequent foveal processing. Aging has been associated with declines in multiple aspects of visual STM, including capacity (Brockmole & Logie, 2013), maintenance in the face of decay (Cowan et al, 2006), and feature binding (i.e., maintaining the associations between object features; Peich, Husain, & Bays, 2013), as well as in low-level aspects of maintaining temporal order in visual and auditory iconic sensory memory (Fogerty et al, 2010, 2016; Walsh & Thompson, 1978). One possibility is that age-related deficits in medial-temporal-lobe mediated associative memory functioning (Naveh-Benjamin, 2001; Mayes, Maltadi, & Migo, 2007) result in the loss of order information that binds parafoveal visual representations to subsequent foveal representations.…”

Visual and auditory temporal integration in healthy younger and older adults

“…It, therefore, seems more likely that the differences in temporal integration originate from a more upstream locus in the perceptual processing pathway. For instance, older people have decreased early sensory memory abilities for short, individual stimuli (Fogerty, Humes, & Busey, 2016 ), making it harder to successfully keep fine-grained, individual stimuli in store. This might result in temporally blurred representations due to longer integration windows.…”

Associations Between Measures of Auditory Function and Brief Assessments of Cognition

“…In one case, the subject was required to identify the stimulus sequence, just as in the monaural version of this task, whereas in the other case, the task was simply to identify which ear (right or left) was stimulated first. Finally, the four-item sequence was included to increase the cognitive demands for this TempOrd identification task, thereby increasing the likelihood for uncovering a common underlying cognitive factor ( Fogerty et al, 2016 ). For all these auditory TempOrd measures, the threshold estimate obtained was the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) that was approximately midway between chance and 100% correct performance on the psychometric function relating performance to SOA.…”