Weiping Yang

This study examined whether an eight-week auricular acupuncture and moxibustion intervention would modulate audiovisual emotional integration in college students with subthreshold depression. Using the frontal LPP as an index of audiovisual integration (AVI), 38 participants completed the study (intervention group: n = 19; no-contact control group: n = 19). At pre- and post-test, participants completed an audiovisual emotional discrimination task. The intervention was associated with reduced SDS scores (64.74 to 54.39, p < 0.001) and improved hit rates for happy (85.9% to 93.9%) and neutral (81.6% to 91.5%) stimuli. At the neural level, frontal LPP AVI for neutral stimuli decreased from −0.12 μV to −5.86 μV (p = 0.010). These preliminary findings suggest that this intervention may alter audiovisual emotional integration in subthreshold depression.

Age-related declines in visual and auditory function are closely linked to cognitive deterioration in older adults. While cross-modal audiovisual training has shown potential for enhancing perceptual sensitivity, its underlying neural mechanisms and transfer effects on higher-order cognitive functions remain largely underexplored. This study aimed to investigate the effects of adaptive audiovisual perceptual training (APT) on cognitive performance and neural activation in older adults. Ninety-two older adults (mean age = 66.3 years, range = 60-77) were assigned to a training group (TG; n = 47) or a control group (CG; n = 45). The TG completed a 7-day APT program, while the CG received no intervention. All participants underwent pretest and posttest assessments, including a training task, audiovisual discrimination task, attention network test (ANT), and audiovisual associative 2-back. Training led to significant behavioral improvements in the TG, as reflected by higher accuracy and faster responses. At the neural level, the TG exhibited enhanced P3 amplitudes over parietal region in the training task, increased P3-AVI amplitudes over central and centro-parietal regions in the audiovisual discrimination task, greater P3 amplitudes over parietal region in the ANT, and increased P2 amplitudes over frontal, fronto-central, and central regions in the 2-back task. These findings demonstrate that adaptive APT effectively enhances audiovisual integration, attentional processing, and working memory in older adults. The results highlight its potential as a non-pharmacological intervention for mitigating age-related cognitive decline.

Olfaction and gustation are central to affective experience, yet their distinct contributions to social emotion perception remain underexplored compared to vision and audition. This study examined how sweet and sour chemosensory cues modulate emotional judgments of facial expressions, testing whether judgments are systematically biased toward hedonically congruent emotion categories. Two behavioral experiments were conducted. In the olfactory session, participants categorized happy, disgusted, and neutral faces at high (100%) and low (50%) intensity while exposed to either a sweet (melon) or sour (vinegar) odor. In the gustatory session, they performed the same task after ingesting the sweet (sucrose) or sour (citric acid) solution. Accuracy and reaction times were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models. The analyses of accuracy data revealed a significant main effect of intensity and a significant condition × emotion interaction. Happy faces were more accurately identified in the sweet condition, whereas disgusted faces were more accurately identified in the sour condition. Sweet and sour chemosensory cues systematically bias emotional judgments of visual facial expressions. These effects support hedonic congruency predictions and highlight the importance of incorporating chemosensory context into multisensory models of emotion.

This study aimed to investigate the effects of audiovisual N-back task training on working memory and audiovisual integration ability in older adults. Twen

Objectives: Aging populations commonly experience a decline in sensory functions, which negatively affects perceptual decision making. The decline in sensory functions has been shown to be partially compensated by audiovisual integration. Although audiovisual integration may have a positive effect on perception, it remains unclear whether the perceptual improvements observed in older adults during perceptual decision making are better explained by the early or late integration hypothesis. Methods: An audiovisual categorization task was used to explore responses to unisensory and audiovisual stimuli in young and older adults. Behavioral drift-diffusion model (DDM) and electroencephalography (EEG) were applied to characterize differences in cognitive and neural dynamics across groups. Results: The DDM showed that older adults exhibited higher drift rates and shorter nondecision times for audiovisual stimuli than for visual or auditory stimuli alone. The EEG results showed that during the early sensory encoding stage (150–300 ms), older adults exhibited greater audiovisual integration in beta band than younger adults. In the late decision-formation stage (500–700 ms), older adults exhibited greater audiovisual integration in beta band and greater audiovisual integration in the anterior frontal electrodes than younger adults. Discussion: These findings highlight the crucial role of audiovisual integration in both the early and late stages of perceptual decision making in older adults. The results suggest that enhanced audiovisual integration in older adults compared with younger adults may serve as a specific mechanism to mitigate the negative effects of aging on perceptual decision making.

Background: In this study, we explored the interplay between exogenous orienting attention and emotional audiovisual integration (AVI) via electroencephalography (EEG). Methods: We designed a 2 (cue validity: valid, invalid) × 3 (emotion types: happiness, neutral and sadness) × 3 (modality: visual, auditory, audiovisual) discrimination task on the basis of the cue–target paradigm. Twenty-two participants (average age: 21.71 ± 1.84 years; 13 females, 9 males) were enrolled in this experiment. Participants were asked to respond to three emotional stimuli presented in different modalities by pressing a corresponding key. Results: The results indicated faster responses to multisensory stimuli than to unisensory stimuli and to the valid cue condition than to the invalid cue condition, which indicated multisensory advantage and cueing effect occurred. In addition, happiness stimuli induced the fastest response compared with neutral and sadness emotion stimuli. EEG findings indicated a reduction in audiovisual integration induced by valid exogenous orienting in the frontal, central and parietal lobe regions. Moreover, neutral emotional stimuli elicited greater audiovisual integration than stimuli expressing happiness and sadness did. Conclusions: Overall, valid exogenous cues and emotional processing decreased audiovisual integration. The present study sheds light on how exogenous attention modulates emotional audiovisual integration and highlights the complex interactions among attention, sensory processing, and the emotional context in multisensory perception.

Introduction: Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) refers to individuals’ perceived decline in memory and/or other cognitive abilities relative to their previous level of performance. Sensory decline is one of the main manifestations of decline in older adults with SCD. The efficient integration of visual and auditory information, known as audiovisual integration, is a crucial perceptual process. This study aims to evaluate audiovisual integration in older adults with SCD.Methods: We adopted the audiovisual detection task, the Colavita task, and the Sound‐Induced Flash Illusion (SIFI) task to evaluate the audiovisual integration by examining both redundant and illusory effects. Older adults diagnosed with SCD (N = 50, mean age = 67.8 years) and a control group of non‐SCD older adults (N = 51, mean age = 66.5 years) were recruited. All participants took part in the three aforementioned experiments.Results: The outcomes showed that a redundant effect occurred in both SCD and non‐SCD older adults, with SCD older adults gaining more benefits in audiovisual detection task. Moreover, an equivalent amount of the visual dominance effect was observed among both SCD and non‐SCD older adults in Colavita task. In addition, older adults with SCD perceived an equal fission illusion but a bigger fusion illusion compared with non‐SCD older adults in SIFI task.Conclusions: Overall, older adults with SCD exhibit increased audiovisual redundant effects and stronger fusion illusion susceptibility compared to non‐SCD older adults. Besides, visual dominance was observed in both groups via the Colavita task, with no significant difference between non‐SCD and SCD older adults. These findings implied that audiovisual integration might offer a potential way for the identification of SCD.

Numerous studies on perceptual training exist, however, most have focused on the precision of temporal audiovisual perception, while fewer have concentrated on ability promotion for audiovisual integration (AVI). To investigate these issues, continuous 5-day audiovisual perceptual training was applied, during which electroencephalography was performed in response to auditory-only (A), visual-only (V) and audiovisual (AV) stimuli before and after training. The results showed that the perceptual sensitivity was greater for training group than for control group and was greater in the posttest than in the pretest. The response to the AV stimulus was significantly faster in the posttest than in the pretest for the older training group but was significantly greater for A and V stimuli for the younger training group. Electroencephalography analysis found higher P3 AVI amplitudes [AV-(A + V)] in the posttest than in the pretest for training group, which were subsequently reflected by an increased alpha (8–12 Hz) oscillatory response and strengthened global functional connectivity (weighted phase lag index). Furthermore, these facilitations were greater for older training groups than for younger training groups. These results confirm the age-related compensatory mechanism for AVI may be strengthened as audiovisual perceptual training progresses, providing an effective candidate for cognitive intervention in older adults.