Multisensory Processing Across Lifespan and Links to Cognition

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议工作的长期目标是提供多感官功能如何随寿命变化的第一个综合视图。新出现的文献表明，一个惊人的漫长的发展过程导致了成熟的多感官状态，有趣的是，晚年的多感官功能可能在一定程度上弥补了与年龄相关的个人感官敏锐度的丧失。除了是第一个详细描述整个生命周期中这些变化的项目外，这项工作还将为了解

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of the proposed work is to provide the first comprehensive view of how multisensory function changes across lifespan. Emerging literature suggests a surprisingly long development process leading up to the mature multisensory state, and intriguingly that multisensory function in later life may compensate to some degree for age-related loss of acuity within the individual senses. In addition to being the first project to detail these changes across lifespan, the work will provide important windows into individual variability in multisensory function, and how certain domains of multisensory function map onto other domains (e.g., spatial vs. temporal function). Finally, the work seeks to detail relationships between multisensory abilities and higher cognitive processes, given that cognition is grounded in both the integrity of the information contained within the incoming sensory streams and the integration between these streams. The experimental approach will employ a sophisticated battery of tasks to assess and relate multisensory and cognitive function. The proposed studies are oriented around two specific aims. The first is to characterize multisensory function in individuals ranging in age from 5 to 85. The second is to relate performance on our battery of multisensory tasks to performance on well-established cognitive tasks that index domains such as attention and working memory. Collectively these studies are predicated on the framework that multisensory function will change in systematic ways across lifespan, and that these changes will have important relationships to cognition. The significance of work lay in its potential to establish these relationships, which will have important implications for furtherig our understanding of the maturation and aging of perceptual and cognitive representations - issues of powerful