Trace: A research media player measuring real-time audience engagement.

Measuring attention and engagement is essential for understanding a wide range of psychological phenomena. Advances in technology have made it possible to measure real-time attention to naturalistic stimuli, providing ecologically valid insight into temporal dynamics. We developed a research protocol called Trace, which records anonymous facial landmarks, expressions, and patterns of movement associated with engagement in screen-based media.

Nutrition is associated with differences in multisensory integration in healthy older adults.

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.

Distinct profiles of multisensory processing between professional goalkeepers and outfield football players.

In association football (soccer), the position of goalkeeper is the most specialised position in the sport and has the primary objective of stopping the opposing team from scoring. While previous studies have highlighted differences in physiological and match performance profiles between goalkeepers and outfield players, surprisingly little research has focused on whether goalkeepers differ in terms of their perceptual-cognitive abilities. Given that goalkeepers use multiple sensory cues and are often required to make rapid decisions based on incomplete multisensory information to fulfil their role, we hypothesised that professional goalkeepers would display enhanced multisensory temporal processing relative to their outfield counterparts.

Audio-visual integration is more precise in older adults with a high level of long-term physical activity.

It is well established that physical activity leads to numerous health, cognitive, and psychological benefits. However, to date, very few studies have investigated the impact of physical activity on multisensory perception, that is, the brain's capacity to integrate information across sensory modalities. Furthermore, it is unknown what level of long-term physical activity is associated with multisensory integration in adults.

Individual differences in seated resting heart rate are associated with multisensory perceptual function in older adults.

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.

The temporal precision of audiovisual integration is associated with longitudinal fall incidents but not sensorimotor fall risk in older adults.

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.

Multisensory integration precision is associated with better cognitive performance over time in older adults: A large-scale exploratory study.

Age-related sensory decline impacts cognitive performance and exposes individuals to a greater risk of cognitive decline. Integration across the senses also changes with age, yet the link between multisensory perception and cognitive ageing is poorly understood. We explored the relationship between multisensory integration and cognitive function in 2875 adults aged 50 + from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing.

Susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion is associated with gait speed in a large sample of middle-aged and older adults.

Background: Multisensory integration is the ability to appropriately merge information from different senses for the purpose of perceiving and acting in the environment. During walking, information from multiple senses must be integrated appropriately to coordinate effective movements. We tested the association between a well characterised multisensory task, the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI), and gait speed in 3255 participants from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing.

Self-Reported Sensory Decline in Older Adults Is Longitudinally Associated With Both Modality-General and Modality-Specific Factors.

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.

Perceptual training narrows the temporal binding window of audiovisual integration in both younger and older adults.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that multisensory processing changes with advancing age - usually in the form of an enlarged temporal binding window - with some studies linking these multisensory changes to negative clinical outcomes. Perceptual training regimes represent a promising means for enhancing the precision of multisensory integration in ageing; however, to date, the vast majority of studies examining the efficacy of multisensory perceptual learning have focused solely on healthy young adults. Here, we measured the temporal binding windows of younger and older participants before and after training on an audiovisual temporal discrimination task to assess (i) how perceptual training affected the shape of the temporal binding window and (ii) whether training effects were similar in both age groups.

Can we measure individual differences in cognitive measures reliably via smartphones? A comparison of the flanker effect across device types and samples.

Research deployed via the internet and administered via smartphones could have access to more diverse samples than lab-based research. Diverse samples could have relatively high variation in their traits and so yield relatively reliable measurements of individual differences in these traits. Several cognitive tasks that originated from the experimental research tradition have been reported to yield relatively low reliabilities (Hedge et al.

The magnitude of the sound-induced flash illusion does not increase monotonically as a function of visual stimulus eccentricity.

The sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) occurs when a rapidly presented visual stimulus is accompanied by two auditory stimuli, creating the illusory percept of two visual stimuli. While much research has focused on how the temporal proximity of the audiovisual stimuli impacts susceptibility to the illusion, comparatively less research has focused on the impact of spatial manipulations. Here, we aimed to assess whether manipulating the eccentricity of visual flash stimuli altered the properties of the temporal binding window associated with the SIFI.

OSARI, an Open-Source Anticipated Response Inhibition Task.

The stop-signal paradigm has become ubiquitous in investigations of inhibitory control. Tasks inspired by the paradigm, referred to as stop-signal tasks, require participants to make responses on go trials and to inhibit those responses when presented with a stop-signal on stop trials. Currently, the most popular version of the stop-signal task is the 'choice-reaction' variant, where participants make choice responses, but must inhibit those responses when presented with a stop-signal.

Sleep duration, sleep problems, and perceived stress are associated with hippocampal subfield volumes in later life: findings from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing.

Study Objectives: This study examines the cross-sectional and 2-year follow-up relationships between sleep and stress and total hippocampal volume and hippocampal subfield volumes among older adults.

Methods: Four hundred seventeen adults (aged 68.8 ± 7.

The development of visuotactile congruency effects for sequences of events.

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.

Gray matter volume in the right angular gyrus is associated with differential patterns of multisensory integration with aging.

Multisensory perception might provide an important marker of brain function in aging. However, the cortical structures supporting multisensory perception in aging are poorly understood. In this study, we compared regional gray matter volume in a group of middle-aged (n = 101; 49-64 years) and older (n = 116; 71-87 years) adults from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging using voxel-based morphometry.

Urban and rural environments differentially shape multisensory perception in ageing.

Recent studies suggest that the lived environment can affect cognition across the lifespan. We examined, in a large cohort of older adults (n = 3447), whether susceptibility to a multisensory illusion, the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI), was influenced by the reported urbanity of current and childhood (at age 14 years) residence. If urban environments help to shape healthy perceptual function, we predicted reduced SIFI susceptibility in urban dwellers.

The effect of eye disease, cataract surgery and hearing aid use on multisensory integration in ageing.

Sensory impairment is common in ageing, as are approaches to treat it. However, the impact of age-related sensory impairment upon multisensory perception remains unexplored, despite the multisensory nature of our environment. Here, we used data from The Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing (TILDA) to investigate whether common, age-related eye diseases (cataracts, glaucoma and Age-Related Macular Degeneration, ARMD) and clinical intervention to improve sensory function (cataract removal and hearing aids) influence multisensory integration in older adults.

Impaired orthostatic heart rate recovery is associated with smaller thalamic volume: Results from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging (TILDA).

The thalamus is a central hub of the autonomic network and thalamic volume has been associated with high-risk phenotypes for sudden cardiac death. Heart rate response to physiological stressors (e.g.

Age-related sensory decline mediates the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion: Evidence for reliability weighting models of multisensory perception.

Perception of our world is proposed to arise from combining multiple sensory inputs according to their relative reliability. We tested multisensory processes in a large sample of 2920 older adults to assess whether sensory ability mediates age-related changes in perception. Participants completed a test of audio-visual integration, the Sound Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI), alongside measures of visual (acuity, contrast sensitivity, self-reported vision and visual temporal discrimination (VTD)) and auditory (self-reported hearing and auditory temporal discrimination (ATD)) function.

Cross-modal interference-control is reduced in childhood but maintained in aging: A cohort study of stimulus- and response-interference in cross-modal and unimodal Stroop tasks.

Interference-control is the ability to exclude distractions and focus on a specific task or stimulus. However, it is currently unclear whether the same interference-control mechanisms underlie the ability to ignore unimodal and cross-modal distractions. In 2 experiments we assessed whether unimodal and cross-modal interference follow similar trajectories in development and aging and occur at similar processing levels.

The threshold for the McGurk effect in audio-visual noise decreases with development.

Across development, vision increasingly influences audio-visual perception. This is evidenced in illusions such as the McGurk effect, in which a seen mouth movement changes the perceived sound. The current paper assessed the effects of manipulating the clarity of the heard and seen signal upon the McGurk effect in children aged 3-6 (n = 29), 7-9 (n = 32) and 10-12 (n = 29) years, and adults aged 20-35 years (n = 32).