Publications by authors named "Alan O'Dowd"

Article Synopsis
  • A study reanalyzed data from Hernández et al. (2019) regarding how age and sex affect temporal audio-visual integration in older adults, specifically focusing on the sound induced flash illusion (SIFI).
  • The analysis included 3,479 older adults and found that while older females were typically more susceptible to SIFI at longer stimulus intervals, younger females (ages 50-64) showed increased susceptibility compared to their male counterparts.
  • The results suggest that both age and sex play significant roles in how older adults integrate sensory information, contributing to the understanding of multisensory processing in aging populations.
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Diet can influence cognitive functioning in older adults and is a modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline. However, it is unknown if an association exists between diet and lower-level processes in the brain underpinning cognition, such as multisensory integration. We investigated whether temporal multisensory integration is associated with daily intake of fruit and vegetables (FV) or products high in fat/sugar/salt (FSS) in a large sample (N = 2,693) of older adults (mean age = 64.

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There is evidence that cardiovascular function can influence sensory processing and cognition, which are known to change with age. However, whether the precision of unisensory and multisensory temporal perception is influenced by cardiovascular activity in older adults is uncertain. We examined whether seated resting heart rate (RHR) was associated with unimodal visual and auditory temporal discrimination as well as susceptibility to the audio-visual Sound Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI) in a large sample of older adults (N = 3232; mean age = 64.

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Article Synopsis
  • Multisensory integration allows the brain to process information from different senses, which is essential for responding to the environment, and this ability changes as people age.
  • The study examined how allostatic load (AL), linked to chronic stress and aging, affects multisensory perception in 1,358 adults over 50, using the Sound Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI) task.
  • Results indicated that participants with higher AL showed lower accuracy in integrating multisensory information, suggesting that chronic stress negatively impacts sensory processing in older adults.
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Sustained multisensory integration over long inter-stimulus time delays is typically found in older adults, particularly those with a history of falls. However, the extent to which the temporal precision of audio-visual integration is associated with longitudinal fall or fall risk trajectories is unknown. A large sample of older adults (N = 2319) were grouped into longitudinal trajectories of self-reported fall incidents (i.

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Background And Objectives: Self-reported sensory data provide important insight into an individual's perception of sensory ability. It remains unclear what factors predict longitudinal change in self-reported sensory ability across multiple modalities during healthy aging. This study examined these associations in a cohort of older adults for vision, hearing, taste, and smell.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to determine if a history of concussions affects multisensory integration in retired professional rugby players compared to retired international rowers.
  • Researchers assessed susceptibility to the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI) by evaluating self-reported concussion history and cognitive performance in both groups.
  • Results showed that rugby players reported more concussions, but neither concussion history nor years in professional sports influenced their performance on the SIFI task.
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Sensitivity to the temporal coherence of visual and tactile signals increases perceptual reliability and is evident during infancy. However, it is not clear how, or whether, bidirectional visuotactile interactions change across childhood. Furthermore, no study has explored whether viewing a body modulates how children perceive visuotactile sequences of events.

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The crossmodal congruency effect (CCE) is augmented when viewing an image of a hand compared to an object. It is unclear if this contextual effect extends to a non-spatial CCE. Here, participants discriminated the number of tactile vibrations delivered to the hand whilst ignoring visual distractors on images of their own or another's hand or an object.

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Synaesthesia has previously been linked with imagery abilities, although an understanding of a causal role for mental imagery in broader synaesthetic experiences remains elusive. This can be partly attributed to our relatively poor understanding of imagery in sensory domains beyond vision. Investigations into the neural and behavioural underpinnings of mental imagery have nevertheless identified an important role for imagery in perception, particularly in mediating cross-modal interactions.

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The neural representation of multisensory space near the body is modulated by the active use of long tools in non-human primates. Here, we investigated whether the electrophysiological correlates of visuo-tactile integration in near and far space were modulated by active tool use in healthy humans. Participants responded to a tactile target delivered to one hand while an irrelevant visual stimulus was presented ipsilaterally in near or far space.

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We investigated the neural underpinnings of texture categorisation using exemplars that were previously learned either within modalities (visual training and visual test) or across modalities (tactile training and visual test). Previous models of learning suggest a decrease in activation in brain regions that are typically involved in cognitive control during task acquisition, but a concomitant increase in activation in brain regions associated with the representation of the acquired information. In our study, participants were required to learn to categorise fabrics of different textures as either natural or synthetic.

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Previous studies have suggested that discrete cross-sensory events could be incorrectly combined in the brain of older adults with a history of falls, possibly undermining motor and balance control. Based on previous findings that multisensory integration is modifiable with practice, even in an ageing population, we designed a serious game, named CityQuest, to train typical, everyday multisensory processes including sensori-motor control, spatial navigation, obstacle avoidance and balance control. Played over several sessions, this game was shown to improve these functions in older adults with and without a history of falls, depending on the specific condition of the game on which they were trained.

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