Citation

Jones SA, Beierholm U, Meijer D, Noppeney U. Neurobiol. Aging 2019; 84: 148-157.

Affiliation

Computational Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2019.08.017

PMID

31586863

Abstract

Aging has been shown to impact multisensory perception, but the underlying computational mechanisms are unclear. For effective interactions with the environment, observers should integrate signals that share a common source, weighted by their reliabilities, and segregate those from separate sources. Observers are thought to accumulate evidence about the world's causal structure over time until a decisional threshold is reached. Combining psychophysics and Bayesian modeling, we investigated how aging affects audiovisual perception of spatial signals. Older and younger adults were comparable in their final localization and common-source judgment responses under both speeded and unspeeded conditions, but were disproportionately slower for audiovisually incongruent trials. Bayesian modeling showed that aging did not affect the ability to arbitrate between integration and segregation under either unspeeded or speeded conditions. However, modeling the within-trial dynamics of evidence accumulation under speeded conditions revealed that older observers accumulate noisier auditory representations for longer, set higher decisional thresholds, and have impaired motor speed. Older observers preserve audiovisual localization performance, despite noisier sensory representations, by sacrificing response speed.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Aging; Bayesian causal inference; Bayesian model; Decision making; Evidence accumulation; Multisensory integration; Multisensory perception; Ventriloquist effect