Previous studies have drawn different conclusions about whether older adults benefit more from audiovisual integration, and such conflicts may have been due to the stimulus features investigated in those studies, such as stimulus intensity. In the current study, using ERPs, we compared the effects of stimulus intensity on audiovisual integration between young adults and older adults. The results showed that inverse effectiveness, which depicts a phenomenon that lowing the effectiveness of sensory stimuli increases benefits of multisensory integration, was observed in young adults at earlier processing stages but was absent in older adults. Moreover, at the earlier processing stages (60–90 ms and 110–140 ms), older adults exhibited significantly greater audiovisual integration than young adults (all ps < 0.05). However, at the later processing stages (220–250 ms and 340–370 ms), young adults exhibited significantly greater audiovisual integration than old adults (all ps < 0.001). The results suggested that there is an age-related dissociation between early integration and late integration, which indicates that there are different audiovisual processing mechanisms in play between older adults and young adults.

先前的研究对老年人是否从视听整合中获益更多得出了不同的结论，而这种冲突可能是由于这些研究中调查的刺激特征，例如刺激强度。在目前的研究中，我们使用 ERP 比较了刺激强度对年轻人和老年人视听整合的影响。结果表明，在早期加工阶段的年轻人中观察到逆效应，它描述了一种现象，即降低感官刺激的有效性会增加多感官整合的益处，但在老年人中不存在。此外，在较早的处理阶段（60-90 毫秒和 110-140 毫秒），老年人表现出比年轻人明显更高的视听整合（所有ps < 0.05)。然而，在后期处理阶段（220-250 ms 和 340-370 ms），年轻人比老年人表现出明显更大的视听整合（所有p s < 0.001）。结果表明早期整合和晚期整合之间存在与年龄相关的分离，这表明老年人和年轻人之间存在不同的视听处理机制。