Postersession 3
Poster #: 75
Topic: MMN across modalities
Friday, Sep 11, 2015
15:30-17:00
1st floor
Auditory and somatosensory mismatch responses in aging and their associations with neuropsychological and physical test scores
1Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
2Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
3Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
juho.strommer@jyu.fi
Aging-related alterations in event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect changes in neural plasticity that, in turn, are assumed to relate to changes in cognitive processing, such as decline in processing speed and inhibitory control. However, the detrimental effects of aging on pre-attentive sensory processing may not be similar across sensory modalities. In two experiments, we recorded obligatory ERPs to sounds deviating in frequency and to electrical pulses deviating in the location in hand in analogous passive oddball tasks from 41 young (20-30 y) and 90 elderly (63-81 y) adults in order to investigate aging-related alterations in early sensory processing. In addition, the relationships between ERPs and measures of cognitive and physical capacity were studied. Aging-related amplitude decrease and latency shift of mismatch response (MMR) were found in both sensory modalities. Furthermore, an early somatosensory response (P50) was increased in amplitude in aged compared to young, possibly reflecting an aging-related decline in sensory gating. In aged, an early somatosensory MMR correlated positively with a principal components analysis-derived composite score of processing speed. The late somatosensory MMR, instead, correlated positively with cardiorespiratory fitness (walking speed and VO2max-estimate) in older adults, but no relationships to neuropsychological test scores were found. In sum, the present data revealed dissociation between somatosensory and auditory deviance detection in aging, and associations of somatosensory MMR with cognitive and physical test scores.