Effects of Age on Multisensory Integration and Social Interaction

Background: Efficient navigation of our social world depends on proper generation, interpretation and combination of social signals within different sensory systems. However, the influence of healthy adult ageing on multisensory integration of emotional and social stimuli remains poorly explored.
Method: The current study investigated the performance of 25 healthy older adults aged 60-80 years on unisensory (auditory and visual) and cross-modal tasks (audio-visual) related to emotion recognition. Performance was compared with 25 younger adults aged 19- 40 years.
Results: Resulting data suggest that older adults display difficulty in recognizing negative emotions within auditory and visual domains when compared with young adults. In contrast, older adults performed as good as younger adults on positive and negative emotional recognition tasks where both congruent auditory and visual emotional information is presented at the same time.
Discussion: The findings suggest that older adults benefit from congruent multisensory information in social situations where sensory information from multiple modalities is integrated into part of multisensory neural network.