Task-Specific, Age Related Effects in the Cross-Modal Identification and Localisation of Objects

Abstract

We investigated age-related effects in cross-modal interactions using tasks assessing spatial perception and object perception. Specifically, an audio-visual object identification task and an audio-visual object localisation task were used to assess putatively distinct perceptual functions in four age groups: children (8-11 years), adolescents (12-14 years), young and older adults. Participants were required to either identify or locate target objects. Targets were specified as unisensory (visual/auditory) or multisensory (audio-visual congruent/audio-visual incongruent) stimuli. We found age-related effects in performance across both tasks. Both children and older adults were less accurate at locating objects than adolescents or young adults. Children were also less accurate at identifying objects relative to young adults, but the performance between young adults, adolescents and older adults did not differ. A greater cost in accuracy for audio-visual incongruent relative to audio-visual congruent targets was found for older adults, children and adolescents relative to young adults. However, we failed to find a benefit in performance for any age group in either the identification or localisation task for audio-visual congruent targets relative to visual-only targets. Our findings suggest that visual information dominated when identifying or localising audio-visual stimuli. Furthermore, on the basis of our results, object identification and object localisation abilities seem to mature late in development and that spatial abilities may be more prone to decline as we age relative to object identification abilities. In addition, the results suggest that multisensory facilitation may require more sensitive measures to reveal differences in cross-modal interactions across higher-level perceptual tasks.

Stimulus Specific to Age-Related Audio-Visual Integration in Discrimination Tasks

“…The simple meaningless visual images (ellipse with horizontal or vertical arrows) and auditory sounds (540 Hz and 560 Hz) were selected according to the study of Giard and Peronnet (1999). The semantic visual images and their corresponding sounds were selected on the basis that each animal had high naming agreement and familiarity norms for both older and younger adults (Barrett & Newell, 2015). The semantic characters (Simplified Chinese) and their corresponding flat tone speech sounds were selected according to the study by Xu et al (2019).…”

Using Race Model Violation to Explore Multisensory Responses in Older Adults: Enhanced Multisensory Integration or Slower Unisensory Processing?

“…The current study also aimed to address the issue of ceiling or floor unisensory responses, which could provide an alternative explanation for enhanced MSI observed in older adults. Mahoney and colleagues (2014) noted that participants in their "No MSI" effect group did not appear to exhibit a multisensory benefit since they were already so fast to respond to one unisensory (usually tactile) stimulus (see also Barrett and Newell, 2015). The authors point out that these older adults might still be capable of MSI, however the visual stimulus was not facilitating a multisensory response.…”

Ageing and multisensory integration: A review of the evidence, and a computational perspective

“…These age-related increases in distractibility are common, but not universal. For example, Campbell et al (2010) assessed trajectory deviations caused by introducing a visual distractor as participants made saccades towards a multisensory target, and found no effect of age, while Barrett and Newell (2015) similarly showed that a spatially incongruent distractor impaired response times in younger and older adults equally. Townsend et al (2006) further found no age-related behavioural differences in an fMRI study of modality-specific attention, though the authors do report that older adults displayed significantly increased frontoparietal activations in response to irrelevant stimuli.…”