Links between temporal acuity and multisensory integration across life span.

Abstract

The temporal relationship between individual pieces of information from the different sensory modalities is one of the stronger cues to integrate such information into a unified perceptual gestalt, conveying numerous perceptual and behavioral advantages. Temporal acuity, however, varies greatly over the life span. It has previously been hypothesized that changes in temporal acuity in both development and healthy aging may thus play a key role in integrative abilities. This study tested the temporal acuity of 138 individuals ranging in age from 5 to 80. Temporal acuity and multisensory integration abilities were tested both within and across modalities (audition and vision) with simultaneity judgment and temporal order judgment tasks. We observed that temporal acuity, both within and across modalities, improved throughout development into adulthood and subsequently declined with healthy aging, as did the ability to integrate multisensory speech information. Of importance, throughout development, temporal acuity of simple stimuli (i.e., flashes and beeps) predicted individuals' abilities to integrate more complex speech information. However, in the aging population, although temporal acuity declined with healthy aging and was accompanied by declines in integrative abilities, temporal acuity was not able to predict integration at the individual level. Together, these results suggest that the impact of temporal acuity on multisensory integration varies throughout the life span. Although the maturation of temporal acuity drives the rise of multisensory integrative abilities during development, it is unable to account for changes in integrative abilities in healthy aging. The differential relationships between age, temporal acuity, and multisensory integration suggest an important role for experience in these processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Shifts in Audiovisual Processing in Healthy Aging

“…A second study echoed and extended these results across the lifespan [8]. This study used a SJ task with simple flashes and beeps in individuals from 6 to 80 years old.…”

“…Results showed a narrowing of the TBW throughout development and into adulthood, confirming previous studies [21, 73], with a subsequent widening of the TBW with healthy aging. In the same subjects, an increase in the canonical McGurk percept was observed throughout development and into adulthood, followed by a decrease in healthy aging [8]. A regression analysis showed that multisensory temporal processing was predictive of the rate of McGurk perception in individual participants during development and into adulthood, but was not similarly predictive during the declines observed in aging.…”

“…Importantly, the narrower an individual’s TBW following training, the narrower the TBW in the sound-induced flash illusion (smaller time window of illusory perception). Thus, while studies show that temporal processing and multisensory integration decouple during their concurrent decline in older adults [72, 8], actively improving temporal processing still influences integration.…”

Audiovisual temporal integration and rapid temporal recalibration in adolescents and adults: Age‐related changes and its correlation with autistic traits

“…From a developmental perspective, the ability to utilize temporal cues to integrate audiovisual information emerges as early as the first year of life for both nonspeech [Lewkowicz, 1996] and speech [Lewkowicz, 2000[Lewkowicz, , 2003[Lewkowicz, , 2010 stimuli, but the size of the TBW is considerably larger than that of adults [Lewkowicz, 1996[Lewkowicz, , 2010. Across the life span, the width of the TBW follows a U-shaped pattern, with both children and older adults requiring longer temporal offset to detect audiovisual asynchrony compared with young adults [Noel, De Niear, Van der Burg, & Wallace, 2016;Stevenson, Baum, Krueger, Newhouse, & Wallace, 2018]. However, as most studies on the TBW are conducted in adults and infants, no clear conclusion has been reached about the developmental trajectory of the width of the TBW during childhood and adolescence.…”

Age-Related Changes in Sensorimotor Temporal Binding

“…Even older adults who are free from cognitive impairment still show signs of sensory and motor decline and poor spatial sensorimotor adaptation (Bock and Schneider, 2002 ; Bock, 2005 ). More recent works also suggest that temporal sensitivity declines with age, as elderly individuals showed a great difficulty in detecting audiovisual asynchrony (Chan et al, 2014 ; Stevenson et al, 2017 ). Moreover, there seems to be indications of a slowing of the internal clock with age indicated by results from unpaced tapping tasks (Turgeon et al, 2011 ; Turgeon and Wing, 2012 ).…”