A multimodal assessment of sensory thresholds in aging.
Young and elderly subjects yielded forced-choice detection thresholds in each of seven sensory tasks: (1) taste of sodium chloride, (2) smell of butanol, (3) cooling, (4) low-frequency vibrotaction, (5) high-frequency vibrotaction, (6) low-frequency hearing, and (7) high-frequency hearing. Average scores across these tasks nearly perfectly separated the 22 elderly from the 15 young subjects. For individual modalities, however, separation between the groups varied from complete (high-frequency touch) to negligible (low-frequency hearing). Scores on the Boston Picture Naming Test and especially the Wechsler Logical Memory Test correlated strongly with average threshold score (Pearson r = .80) and moderately with scores on individual modalities. This sensory-cognitive link is not caused, as might be supposed, by diminishing age-related capacity to handle the detection task, because the very same task resulted in negligible age effect (low-frequency hearing) and large effect (high-frequency hearing) in the same subjects.
John B. Pierce Laboratory, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. jstevens@jbpierce.org
J C
JC
Stevens
L A
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Cruz
L E
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Marks
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Lakatos
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D012016:Reference Values; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D012903:Smell; D013652:Taste Threshold; D013697:Thermosensing; D014110:Touch; D014732:Vibration