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觉功能在整个生命周期中如何变化的第一个全面视图。新兴的文献表明，一个令人惊讶的漫长的发展过程导致成熟的多感官状态，有趣的是，多感官功能在以后的生活中可能会在一定程度上补偿与年龄相关的敏锐度损失的个人感觉。除了是第一个详细说明这些变化的项目外，这项工作还将提供重要的窗口， 多感觉功能的个体差异，以及多感觉功能的某些域如何映射到其他域（例如，空间与时间函数）。最后，这项工作旨在详细说明多感官能力和更高的认知过程之间的关系，因为认知是建立在传入的感觉流中包含的信息的完整性和这些流之间的整合。实验方法将采用一系列复杂的任务来评估和关联多感官和认知功能。拟议的研究围绕两个具体目标。第一个是表征5至85岁个体的多感觉功能。第二个是将我们在多感官任务中的表现与在已建立的认知任务中的表现联系起来，这些认知任务索引了注意力和工作记忆等领域。总的来说，这些研究都是基于这样一个框架，即多感觉功能将在整个生命周期中以系统的方式发生变化，并且这些变化将与认知有重要的关系。工作的重要性在于它有可能建立这些关系，这将对我们进一步理解知觉和认知表征的成熟和老化产生重要影响--这些问题是强大的

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