Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Investigating how the brain integrates multi-modal information is critical for understanding the deleterious effects of ageon performance for tasks that integrate visual and auditory stimuli (e.g., driving or flying). We report on how auditoryprocessing was impacted by age during the encoding and maintenance phases of a visual-spatial task using electroen-cephalography in a sample of 10 older (50-80 years) and 10 younger (18-32 years) participants. Event-related spectralperturbation analyses reveal how both the online processing and memory stages of visual-spatial working memory tasksaffected auditory processes differentially across the age groups. Results reveal that older age may restrict the resourcesavailable for online processing of auditory information, particularly in brain regions that are also normally lateralizedfor visual-spatial tasks. Our findings point to the importance of designing interfaces, such as those found in aircraft orautomobiles, that support optimal performance and accommodate normal age-related changes in neural processes.