The Influence of Aging on Audiovisual Temporal Order Judgments

Abstract

Background/Study Context: The perception of naturalistic events depends on the ability to integrate perceptual information from multiple sensory systems. Currently, little is known about how multisensory integration is affected by normal aging.

Methods: The authors conducted two experiments to investigate audiovisual temporal processing in younger (18–29 years) and older (70+ years) adults. In both experiments, participants were presented with a brief visual stimulus and a brief auditory stimulus separated by various temporal offsets, and participants judged which stimulus was presented first. In Experiment 1, the auditory and visual stimuli were presented from the same perceived location, whereas in Experiment 2 they were presented from different locations.

Results: The authors found no effect of stimulus location, and no evidence of age-related declines in performance in either experiment.

Conclusion: Older adults appear to retain the ability to discriminate the temporal order of audiovisual stimuli and can perform similarly to younger adults.

Acknowledgments

Authors C.M.F and E.C.H contributed equally to the completion of this project.

The authors would like to thank Donna Waxman for her helpful assistance in data collection.

Notes

¹In a pilot experiment designed to assess the influence of the auditory tone intensity on TOJ performance, we manipulated the tone intensity over a wide range of different suprathreshold intensities. The resulting PSS and JND values obtained at each level of intensity were largely the same. In other words, the intensity of the auditory tone did not seem to impact performance in our task.

²The value was estimated from the sample sizes and error bars in Virsu et al.'s Figure 1.