As the proportion of adults in the US over the age of 65 grows, the medical community must continue to develop innovative techniques that promote independence and enhanced quality of life among older adults. A number of age-related problems that can result in disability and dependence are associated with changes in the integration of information from multiple sensory modalities. When input from different sensory modalities contains incongruent or distracting information, people of all ages experience difficulties performing a wide range of tasks;however, our laboratory and others have consistently shown that older adults are more susceptible to the effects of distracting cross-modal stimuli than younger adults. Interestingly, when redundant or congruent information is present in multiple sensory modalities, older adults exhibit greater performance gains than younger adults. An ideal strategy for improving multisensory processing in older adults would be to minimize the detrimental effects of incongruent cross-modal distractors while maintaining the benefits provided by redundant multisensory stimuli. Attention is one mechanism that can modulate multisensory processing, and attention training programs have successfully improved executive function in various patient populations. Little is known, however, about how attention training impacts sensory processing in healthy older adults. The proposed study will address this critical issue by employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and cerebral perfusion imaging to investigate the neural changes that accompany participation in an 8-week attention training program.
Specific aims for this project are to determine the magnitude and extent of training-induced changes in: 1) neural activity during a task of executive function;2) neural activity during a task of multisensory processing;and 3) regional cerebral blood flow during rest. During this project, we will learn about how the brain functions when older adults complete a training program that requires them to practice blocking out distracting items and pay attention to important information in their surroundings. The knowledge gained from this study will help us to understand how training programs can change the way our brains combine the things we see with the sounds we hear. These findings will be used to help older adults maintain the ability to focus their attention and minimize the amount that they are distracted by irrelevant information.
| Mozolic, Jennifer L; Long, Ashley B; Morgan, Ashley R et al. (2011) A cognitive training intervention improves modality-specific attention in a randomized controlled trial of healthy older adults. Neurobiol Aging 32:655-68 |
| Hugenschmidt, Christina E; Mozolic, Jennifer L; Tan, Huan et al. (2009) Age-related increase in cross-sensory noise in resting and steady-state cerebral perfusion. Brain Topogr 21:241-51 |
| Hugenschmidt, Christina E; Mozolic, Jennifer L; Laurienti, Paul J (2009) Suppression of multisensory integration by modality-specific attention in aging. Neuroreport 20:349-53 |
