Evaluating Multisensory Stimuli as a Mechanism to Boost Cognition and Wellbeing in Old Age, 2021-2024

With advancing healthcare and increased standards of living, the proportion of older adults in society is now higher than ever and is set to rise further over the coming decades. A key focus of research is to ensure that individuals maintain their cognitive abilities and quality of life into an extended old age. The current project aimed to explore the successful coping with age-related declines in sensory ability, by finding out how combining sensory information from multiple sources may compensate for impairments in hearing and vision.

The data repository contains a variety of behavioural psychology work testing if age differences in cognition can be manipulated across unimodal and multimodal stimuli presentation. This was achieved by manipulating the presence of visual and auditory information when participants completed tasks involving attention and memory.

Overall, data largely showed similar influences of modality for young and older adults. This is in contrast to predictions derived from the literature.