Preserved Discrimination Performance and Neural Processing during Crossmodal Attention in Aging

Mishra, Jyoti; Gazzaley, Adam · 2013 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081894

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Summary

This study investigates whether aging affects the neural and behavioral benefits of crossmodal attention, specifically comparing healthy older adults (60–82 years) with younger adults (19–29 years). While unisensory processing and general attention often degrade with age, prior research suggested that multisensory integration might remain intact or even improve. The authors aimed to determine if the performance advantages observed in younger adults when distributing attention across auditory and visual modalities are preserved in older populations, and to examine the underlying neural mechanisms using event-related potentials (ERPs). The experimental design utilized a target detection task where participants identified animal names presented in visual, auditory, or simultaneous audiovisual streams. Two attentional conditions were tested: focused visual attention (ignoring auditory input) and distributed audiovisual attention (monitoring both modalities). Stimuli were either semantically congruent (e.g., visual "dog" and auditory "dog") or incongruent (e.g., visual "dog" and auditory "bed"). Behavioral performance was measured via discrimination accuracy ($d'$) and response times (RTs). Neural processing was assessed using 64-channel EEG, analyzing ERP components related to visual (P1, N1) and auditory (P2) processing through difference waves. Source localization was performed using LAURA modeling to identify intracranial generators. Behavioral results indicated that older adults exhibited slower response times and higher false alarm rates overall compared to younger adults, reflecting general age-related declines. However, the specific benefits of distributed attention were preserved. For semantically congruent stimuli, older adults showed faster RTs during distributed attention compared to focused attention, with no difference in accuracy. For semantically incongruent stimuli, discrimination accuracy significantly improved during distributed attention relative to focused attention. Crucially, there were no significant interactions between age and attention conditions for these crossmodal benefits, indicating that the advantage of distributing attention across modalities did not diminish with age. Neural analysis revealed that higher-performing older adults displayed intact crossmodal integration signatures similar to younger adults, with reduced processing amplitudes for auditory and visual constituents under distributed attention, consistent with efficient multisensory processing. The findings demonstrate that while aging impacts general sensory speed and inhibitory control (evidenced by increased false alarms), the capacity to benefit from crossmodal attention remains intact. Older adults can leverage distributed audiovisual attention to improve discrimination performance and neural efficiency similarly to younger adults. This suggests that crossmodal attention mechanisms are resilient to aging, challenging the notion of broad deficits in multisensory processing. The study highlights that top-down attentional strategies focusing on all relevant sensory information can mitigate age-related processing inefficiencies, offering insights into how older adults maintain functional performance in complex, real-world multisensory environments.

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• multisensory crossmodal