The sound-induced flash illusion reveals dissociable age-related effects in multisensory integration

David P. McGovern · Eugenie Roudaia · T.M. McGinnity · Fiona Nora Newell

106 citations0/0 files storedFrontiers in Aging Neuroscience

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Multisensory perception and integration Neuroscience and Music Perception Tactile and Sensory Interactions

Abstract

While aging can lead to significant declines in perceptual and cognitive function, the effects of age on multisensory integration, the process in which the brain combines information across the senses, are less clear. Recent reports suggest that older adults are susceptible to the sound-induced flash illusion (Shams et al., 2000) across a much wider range of temporal asynchronies than younger adults (Setti et al., 2011). To assess whether this cost for multisensory integration is a general phenomenon of combining asynchronous audiovisual input, we compared the time courses of two variants of the sound-induced flash illusion in young and older adults: the fission illusion, where one flash accompanied by two beeps appears as two flashes, and the fusion illusion, where two flashes accompanied by one beep appear as one flash. Twenty-five younger (18-30 years) and older (65+ years) adults were required to report whether they perceived one or two flashes, whilst ignoring irrelevant auditory beeps, in bimodal trials where auditory and visual stimuli were separated by one of six stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). There was a marked difference in the pattern of results for the two variants of the illusion. In conditions known to produce the fission illusion, older adults were significantly more susceptible to the illusion at longer SOAs compared to younger participants. In contrast, the performance of the younger and older groups was almost identical in conditions known to produce the fusion illusion. This surprising difference between sound-induced fission and fusion in older adults suggests dissociable age-related effects in multisensory integration, consistent with the idea that these illusions are mediated by distinct neural mechanisms.

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References

2000What you see is what you hear 2010The multifaceted interplay between attention and multisensory integration 2002Visual illusion induced by sound 2004Unraveling multisensory integration: patchy organization within human STS multisensory cortex 2011The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes 2010Renovation of Journal of Visualization 2005Enhanced multisensory integration in older adults 2011The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes

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2020What you see is what you hear: Twenty years of research using the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion 2015Impaired timing of audiovisual events in the elderly 2020Audiovisual temporal integration: Cognitive processing, neural mechanisms, developmental trajectory and potential interventions 2021Ageing and multisensory integration: A review of the evidence, and a computational perspective 2016Changed crossmodal functional connectivity in older adults with hearing loss 2016

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