Cross-Modal Perceptual Learning in Healthy Aging
2Department of Special Education, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel
Background
Perceptual learning can improve sensory performance, but it remains unclear whether older adults can transfer learning across auditory and visual modalities. This study examined whether healthy aging affects trained-task learning, cross-modal transfer, and cumulative learning across sequential auditory and visual signal-in-noise training.
Methods
Forty-five participants were divided into three groups (n = 15 each): healthy older adults (60-75 years), an older-adult control group (60-75 years), and young adults (20-35 years). Participants completed auditory pseudoword-in-noise and visual motion direction discrimination tasks across three sessions: Pretest, Posttest 1, and Posttest 2. The training groups completed home-based auditory training followed by home-based visual training, while the older active control group completed unrelevant tasks. Untrained auditory and visual signal-only tasks; frequency discrimination, and spatial frequency discrimination were also assessed to examine whether learning generalized beyond the trained signal-in-noise tasks.
Results
Older adults showed significant training-related improvements in the auditory-trained task after auditory training and in the visual-trained task after visual training, whereas older control participants showed no reliable gains. However, young adults demonstrated larger and faster improvements than older adults. Cross-modal transfer between auditory and visual signal-in-noise tasks was significant in young adults but was not reliable in older adults. Cumulative learning across the full training period was observed in both young and older adults, with greater improvement in young adults. Transfer to untrained signal-only tasks was limited and task-dependent.
Conclusion
Healthy older adults retain perceptual learning capacity in auditory and visual signal-in-noise tasks, but aging appears to reduce learning rate and constrain cross-modal transfer. These findings suggest that supra-modal learning mechanisms supporting cross-modal generalization are less accessible in healthy aging.