Spatio-temporal patterns of event-related potentials related to audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults.
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 judgments in older adults using electroencephalography (EEG). Fourteen younger (18-32 year old) and 16 older (61-74 year old) adults performed an audiovisual synchrony judgment 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 judgments 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 used different resources to maintain a similar level of performance in audiovisual synchrony judgments compared with younger adults.
['Chan|Yu Man|YM|', 'Pianta|Michael Julian|MJ|', 'Bode|Stefan|S|', 'McKendrick|Allison Maree|AM|']
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation D000293:Adolescent D000328:Adult D000368:Aged D000375:Aging D001303:Auditory Cortex D001307:Auditory Perception D004569:Electroencephalography D058407:Electroencephalography Phase Synchronization D005071:Evoked Potentials D005260:Female D006801:Humans D007600:Judgment D008297:Male D008875:Middle Aged D010775:Photic Stimulation D014793:Visual Cortex D014796:Visual Perception D055815:Young Adult
Audiovisual Synchrony Perception EEG Aging Multisensory