Symposium: Deviance-detection across modalities
Thursday, Sep 10, 2015
12:00-13:00
Hörsaal 3

Somatosensory mismatch response in young and elderly adults

Piia Astikainen¹, Saara Järveläinen¹, Sanni Koivula¹, Ina Tarkka², & Juho Strömmer¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
²Department of Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
piia.astikainen@jyu.fi

In aging, change detection and predictive coding of the environmental events is gradually declined. Accordingly, the mismatch negativity in the auditory and visual modalities is reported to be declined in healthy aging. Here I describe two studies in which somatosensory mismatch responses (sMMR) are examined in healthy young and elderly participants. We recorded event-related potentials to electrical pulses with changes in the location of the stimuli in hand, while participants were attending to a visual task. In the first study, two differential responses with positive polarity were found in young: an early sMMR centro-parietally at 180–220 ms and a late sMMR fronto-centrally at 250–290 ms mean latency. In aged, the early sMMR was absent and the late sMMR was attenuated and reduced in scalp distribution compared to young. In the second study, the early and late sMMR were depicted at 153-193 ms and at 258-358 ms mean latency range, respectively. Again, the early sMMR was attenuated in aged compared to young, but no differences between the age groups in the late sMMR were found. In aged, the early sMMR showed a positive correlation with a composite score of processing speed, derived from principal components analysis of neuropsychological test scores. The late sMMR, instead, correlated positively with cardiorespiratory fitness (walking speed and VO2max-estimate) in older adults, but no relationships to neuropsychological test scores were found. The results suggest that sMMR is a valuable measure of aging-related changes in cognitive and physical capacity.