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第一个关于多感官功能如何在生命周期中变化的综合观点。新出现的文献表明，通向成熟的多感官状态有一个令人惊讶的漫长的发展过程，有趣的是，晚年的多感官功能可能在一定程度上补偿因年龄而导致的个体感官敏锐度的丧失。除了是第一个详细描述这些跨越生命周期的变化的项目外，这项工作还将为人们提供了解 多感觉功能的个体变异性，以及多感觉功能的某些领域如何映射到其他领域(例如，空间功能与时间功能)。最后，这项工作试图详细说明多感觉能力和更高认知过程之间的关系，因为认知既基于传入感觉流中包含的信息的完整性，也基于这些流之间的整合。实验方法将使用一系列复杂的任务来评估和联系多感觉和认知功能。拟议的研究围绕两个具体目标展开。第一个是对5岁到85岁的个体的多感官功能进行表征。第二个是将我们的多感官任务的表现与成熟的认知任务的表现联系起来，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，即多感官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关系。工作的意义在于它可能建立这些关系，这将对我们进一步理解知觉和认知表征的成熟和老化--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