Crossmodal selection in attention and action: Age-related changes in cognitive preparation of crossmodal processing and their neural underpinnings

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The influence of crossmodal stimulation, crossmodal responses and their mappings in general as well as the fact that complex situations in a crossmodal context are especially demanding with higher age has rather been neglected in the context of research on cognitive control. Thus, it is important to examine the mechanisms underlying age-related difficulties in crossmodal processing at both the cognitive-behavioral and neuro-cognitive level. In this project, we focus on one potential factor that may influence crossmodal processing, namely cognitive preparation. It has been shown that performance in multitasking can improve under certain conditions such as prolonged preparation time or precuing of a demanded response. However, it seems that preparation benefits are in parts age-related. Furthermore, previous research on cognitive preparation mostly disregarded modality-specific influences, which might additionally contribute to age-related differences. Finally, little is known regarding the underlying possible neural processes of crossmodal cognitive preparation. As regards age-related effects, exploring neural processes might help to better understand why the performance between younger and older adults differs and whether and how age-related changes in neural systems may adapt in order to perform the same crossmodal mental operations as in young adults. Taken together, the current state of the art strongly implies the need for further research. We will act on this by establishing a new cooperation between Germany and Taiwan to combine our competences in the study of crossmodal processing (Aachen) and the corresponding underlying neural processes (Tainan). Our joint research aims to integrate our previous research to achieve a deeper understanding of age-related effects in crossmodal processing and examine age-related changes in cognitive preparation of crossmodal processing on different, yet connected levels of cognitive processing by implementing three different crossmodal paradigms in three work packages a) Stimulus selection: A crossmodal attention switching paradigm is used to explore potential age-related differences in modality-specific congruency effects; b) (Stimulus-Response) Mapping selection: The crossmodal task-mapping switching paradigm is used to explore whether older adults have more problems in selecting and preparing modality mappings in mixed-task situations; c) Response selection: We will design a crossmodal response precuing paradigm to examine whether older adults show impairments in response preparation when using different effectors. Together, this research will help to better understand age-related changes in crossmodal information processing, which is highly important because of the ubiquity of crossmodal processing in natural task contexts outside the experimental lab and because understanding age-related cognitive changes represents a major challenge in our aging society.