Aging and temporal processing: A multi-modality study

描述（由申请人提供）：据估计，至少有10-15%的美国老年人，或200 - 300万人，经历不止一种感官障碍，包括听觉、视觉和触觉。拟议中的项目评估了一大群年轻人和老年人在一系列测试中的表现，这些测试衡量了听觉、视觉和触觉的时间处理能力。该项目的主要目的是：(1)确定成年人的感官输入的时间加工是否受到听觉、视觉或触觉模式的影响；(2)确定从同一组年轻人和老年人参与者获得的类似时间处理测量的传感器模式之间是否存在相关性；(3)确定在特定模态内的时间加工的各种测量是否相关，而不考虑年龄。第一个目标主要是通过检查由同一组年轻人和老年人组成的群体之间在听觉、视觉和触觉方面的表现差异，以及与年龄的相关性来解决。根据之前在每种感觉模式下进行的时间处理的孤立实验，可以预期老年人作为一个群体，在大多数这些任务上的表现会比年轻人差，并且可能在每种模式下都做sc。但是，由于将在所有三种方式中获得一套平行的时间措施，因此拟议的项目也将能够通过相关分析处理上述确定的目标。此外，关于第二个目标，在给定年龄组内，在特定时间处理措施上不同模式的表现的相关性将提供强有力的证据，证明这种处理是模态的，可能共享一个共同的潜在中枢或认知过程。通过这种方式，在拟议的项目中使用年轻和老年受试者不仅将揭示老年人经历的感觉障碍的性质，而且还将揭示不分年龄的不同模式的时间处理机制的性质。结构方程建模将用于检查测量之间的相关性，并解决不同模式共享受年龄影响的共同时间处理机制的程度。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It has been estimated that at least 10-15% of the elderly American population, or 2-3 million individuals, experience impairments in more than one sensory modality, including hearing, sight and touch. The proposed project assesses the performance of a large group of young and elderly adults on a battery of tests that measure temporal-processing abilities in the auditory, visual and tactual senses. The primary aims of the proposed project are: (1) to determine whether temporal processing of sensory input by adults is affected by advancing age in either the auditory, visual or tactile modalities; (2) to establish whether correlations exist across sensor modalities for similar measures of temporal processing obtained from the same set of young and elderl, participants; and (3) to determine whether various measures of temporal processing within a particular modality are correlated, regardless of age. The first aim is addressed primarily through examination of differences in performance on auditory, visual and tactile measures of temporal processing between groups comprised of the same set of young and elderly individuals, as well as through correlations with age. Based on isolated experiments on temporal processing conducted previously within each sensory modality, it is anticipated that elderly subjects, as a group, will perform worse than young adults on most of these tasks and will likely do sc for each modality. Since a parallel set of temporal measures will be obtained across all three modalities however, the proposed project also will be able to address the aims identified above through correlational analyses. In addition, regarding the second aim, within a given age group, correlations in performance across modalities on a particular temporal-processing measure will provide strong evidence that such processing is amodal, likely sharing a common underlying central or cognitive process. In this way, use of young and elderly subjects in the proposed project will not only shed light on the nature of sensory impairments experienced b the elderly, but also on the nature of temporal processing mechanisms across modalities regardless of age. Structural equation modeling will be used to examine the correlations between measures and address the degree to which different modalities share a common temporal processing mechanism that is affected by age.