The role of informational content of visual speech in an audiovisual cocktail party: Evidence from cortical oscillations in young and old participants

Begau, Alexandra; Klatt, Laura‐Isabelle; Schneider, Daniel; Wascher, Edmund; Getzmann, Stephan · 2022 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1111/ejn.15811

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

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Summary

This study investigates age-related differences in the neural processing of audiovisual speech within a multi-talker "cocktail party" environment. While older adults often experience sensory and cognitive declines, they typically retain the ability to integrate multisensory information, which can serve as a compensatory mechanism. The research specifically examines how the informational content of visual speech—whether congruent (informative) or task-irrelevant (uninformative)—modulates cortical oscillations associated with conflict processing, multisensory integration, and attention. The authors hypothesized that older adults would exhibit greater reliance on cognitive control mechanisms when processing conflicting audiovisual inputs compared to younger adults. The experimental design involved 39 healthy participants: 18 older adults (aged 60–70) and 21 younger adults (aged 20–34). Participants performed a speeded two-alternative forced-choice word discrimination task, identifying target words (/yes/ or /no/) presented at a fixated location while ignoring distractor words at an opposite location. The study manipulated visual speech content in two conditions: informative, where visual speech was congruent with the auditory signal, and uninformative, where the speaker’s mouth movements were unrelated to the auditory content. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs), focusing on theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–12 Hz), and beta (16–30 Hz) oscillations. Theta activity was analyzed for conflict processing, alpha for selective attention, and beta for multisensory integration. Behavioral results indicated that both age groups benefited from informative visual speech, demonstrating improved performance compared to the uninformative condition. However, neural oscillatory patterns revealed significant age-related differences. Older adults exhibited stronger theta perturbations in response to uninformative visual speech, suggesting increased engagement of cognitive control networks to resolve conflict between incongruent auditory and visual inputs. Additionally, older adults showed stronger beta suppression for informative visual speech, indicative of enhanced multisensory integration mechanisms. In contrast, younger adults did not show significant differences between conditions in the theta and beta bands. No significant condition differences were observed in the alpha band for either group, although older adults generally displayed stronger beta perturbations overall. The findings suggest that while the behavioral benefit of informative visual speech is preserved in aging, the underlying neural mechanisms differ significantly between age groups. Older adults require greater cognitive control to process conflicting audiovisual information and engage multisensory integration mechanisms more robustly when visual cues are informative. This indicates that aging alters the neural strategies used for speech perception in complex environments, with older adults relying more heavily on top-down control and integration processes to compensate for sensory or attentional declines. These results highlight the importance of considering informational content in visual speech when studying age-related changes in multisensory processing.

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• auditory