Evaluating multisensory stimuli as a mechanism to boost cognition and wellbeing in old age

With advancing healthcare and increased standards of living, the proportion of older adults in society is now higher than ever and is set to rise further over the coming decades. A key focus of research is to ensure that individuals maintain their cognitive abilities and quality of life into an extended old age. The current project aims to explore the successful coping with age-related declines in sensory ability, by finding out how combining sensory information from multiple sources may compensate for impairments in hearing and vision.

Hearing impairment affects 71% of adults over 70 and more than 96% of those aged over 50 wear spectacles at least some of the time. A variety of recent research has shown that older adults perform better in tasks that utilise multimodal stimuli (e.g., audiovisual). This preference towards multisensory processing in older adults is a new result in the literature. It is currently unknown if this is a general change (like other effects of ageing such as slowing and memory loss), or if it is a compensatory process resulting from age-related sensory decline. Our data will resolve this issue and we will also establish if websites and phone calls can be usefully enhanced by video, which is multisensory.

We propose that multisensory stimuli can alleviate age deficits typically found in memory tasks by supporting cognitively-demanding perceptual processing. A well-established feature of age-related sensory loss (such as impaired vision and hearing) is its association with corresponding age-related deficits in cognition (such as memory and paying attention). A surprising finding is that some patterns of age deficits in cognition can be replicated in young adults by reducing their ability to perceive experimental stimuli: For example, if a list of items is degraded so that it is harder to see, young adults will find it harder to remember that list than a list of easy-to-see items. This suggests that perceptual processes are taking up cognitive resources that might otherwise have been used to effectively memorise information. Such findings therefore demonstrate the potential to improve cognitive performance by facilitating perception. In this study, we will investigate whether memory improves when people can both see and hear the lists of items.

The finding that older adults make more use of multisensory (auditory and visual) stimuli comes mainly from studies where older adults make simple responses to visual, auditory, or audiovisual stimuli. Memory tasks involve more complicated perceptual and cognitive processes. In a series of 9 studies, we will advance the theoretical understanding of multisensory processing in ageing and establish how memory performance can be improved by making stimuli multisensory. We will also establish if a bias towards multisensory processing in older adults is a result of individual differences in sensory ability (e.g., does an individual with hearing impairment use more visual information than an individual without hearing impairment), or if this is just a general response to ageing. We will also establish if age deficits can be further alleviated by actively encouraging the use of multisensory stimuli through experimental instruction.

Finally, we will investigate whether the benefits we find in lab-based studies can lead to real-world improvements in memory and wellbeing for older adults. For example, we will investigate whether multimedia information can help older adults to obtain and remember health information more effectively than when information is only presented visually. Throughout the project, we will evaluate how receptive older adults are to the utilisation of multisensory materials in different contexts to assess where these interventions should be targeted. This work is led by Dr Stephen Badham and funded by ESRC £525,000, ES/V000071/1].