Enhanced multisensory gain in older adults may be a by-product of inverse effectiveness: Evidence from a speeded response-time task.

Older adults experience a greater benefit from multisensory integration than their younger counterparts, but it is unclear why. One hypothesis is that age-related sensory decline weakens unisensory stimulus effectiveness, causing a boost in multisensory gain through inverse effectiveness. Many previous studies present stimuli at the same intensity for both younger and older adults (i.