Crossmodal Processing and Ageing

Healthy ageing and its effects on crossmodal processing

One of the areas we research is how our brain combines information from the different senses and how this changes in healthy ageing. As we get older, it’s particularly beneficial to combine information from different senses, like sight, sound and touch. This is because as we age, our senses become weaker individually. Combining information across vision, audition, touch and other modalities helps us form a more reliable interpretation of our surroundings and tends to compensates for this. 

For example, when listening to someone speak in noisy surroundings, we use their lip movements to help us understand what they are saying better. We do this effortlessly and without noticing. The time it takes us to react to things around us is hearingseeingalways faster if we have information from more than one sense. Our ability to detect sounds is often better if they are accompanied by synchronized visual events. Combining sound and vision can give rise to illusions such as in ventriloquism, where an actor's voice seems to be coming from a puppet. Our brain matches similarities between what we see and what we hear - such as the timing of the sound and the movements of the puppet – and is fooled into thinking that the voice is coming from the latter.

Research shows that in later life, we integrate the senses more than we need to in order to compensate for the amount our individual senses decline. Our precision in judging whether events from different modalities happened at the same or at different times also decreases, meaning that we might be combining information that may not belong together. This is likely to have consequences on more complex tasks such as understanding speech for example. In the Multisense Lab, one of our goals is to find out how and why these changes happen and whether they are related to age-related differences in other abilities, such as memory and attention.

Synaesthesia

What is synaesthesia? 

Our team is world leading in research on Synaesthesia, a rare and fascinating condition experienced by a small number of people whose brains have more connections than the average person. This results in joining of sensations, which are normally experienced separately. For example, a synaesthete may see colours when listening to music or when looking at letters or numbers. Other synaesthetes may even have a strong feeling that letters and/or numbers have moods or personalities, they may experience certain tastes when they hear words or feel touch when they see someone else being touched. Most synaesthetes have no idea that other people don't experience this. 

Studying synaesthesia helps us to understand how the brain divides and combines different sensations and thoughts. We have been looking at a wide variety of topics related to synaesthesia, including language, genetics, memory and sensory perception. 

Effects of healthy ageing on synaesthesia

Recently, we became particularly interested in how synaesthesia changes with age and how it might affect other abilities later in life. For example, memory tends to decline a little with age, but people with more connections (including synaesthetes) tend have better memory. Even as they grow older, their memory is as good as an average younger person's. The colours synaesthetes experience also seem to change with age. With our research, we hope not only to discover new age-related changes in the way the senses are combined in both synaestheisa and the general population, but to also find out why they happen. 

letterspersonalitycoloursSome synaesthetes may see colours when looking at letters or numbers, whereas others may have a strong feeling that letters have moods or personalities.

 

Taking part in our research 

What do the studies involve?

We are always looking for people to take part in our studies, whether they think they may have synaesthesia or not. Studies involve completing questionnaires or tasks measuring attention, memory and/or sensory perception. Our participants typically enjoy taking part, and find the research interesting! Some tasks can be done independently at home on on personal computers and sometimes we invite people to  the university (located just outside Brighton) to test them in person. When we do this, we cover petrol or public transport costs. None of the tasks are harmful in any way, and you can quit whenever you want without even having to give an explanation. You can of course simply ask us not contact you in future. Once you complete studies, we let you know what we were interested in. 

Our studies are always very carefully ethically approved, and your personal details (name, etc.) would never be passed to anybody else outside our research group; you would always be referred to in any reports by an anonymous code, in accordance with the Data Protection Act (1998). 

How to take part

Simply email us at studies@psychology.sussex.ac.uk  letting us know your name, age and sex. We would then invite you (via e-mail) to take part in our studies. You can choose to take part in some tests but not others, or simply have your contact details removed at any point.

Or take our online survey about cognitive experiences using this link: 

https://sussex.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/cognitive_experiences

 

 

 

 

 

To take part in our research

Simply email us at:  

studies@psychology.sussex.ac.uk  

letting us know your name, age and
sex. We would then invite you
(via e-mail) to take part in our
studies. You can choose to take
part in some tests but not others,
or simply have your contact details
removed at any point.

Or, you can take our online survey
about cognitive experiences
by clicking below: 

Cognitive Experiences Questionnaire  

Find out more about synaesthesia

To find out more about synaesthesia,
click on the link below:

Synaesthesia FAQs  

Meet the team

Our research into ageing
is run by Prof. Julia Simner
and the members of her lab,
Drs Abby Ipser and Duncan
Carmichael.