Spatio-temporal patterns of event-related potentials related to audiovisual synchrony judgements in older adults

Publication date: Available online 18 March 2017
Source:Neurobiology of Aging
Author(s): Yu Man Chan, Michael Julian Pianta, Stefan Bode, Allison Maree McKendrick
Older adults have altered perception of the relative timing between auditory and visual stimuli, even when stimuli are scaled to equate detectability. To help understand why, this study investigated the neural correlates of audiovisual synchrony judgements in older adults using electroencephalography (EEG). Fourteen younger (18–32 years old) and sixteen older (61–74 years old) adults performed an audiovisual synchrony judgement task on flash-pip stimuli while EEG was recorded. All participants were assessed to have healthy vision and hearing for their age. Observers responded to whether audiovisual pairs were perceived as synchronous or asynchronous via a button press. The results showed that the onset of predictive sensory information for synchrony judgements was not different between groups. Channels over auditory areas contributed more to this predictive sensory information than visual areas. The spatial-temporal profile of the EEG activity also indicates that older adults utilised different resources to maintain a similar level of performance in audiovisual synchrony judgements compared to younger adults.



http://ift.tt/2mWKqq0