Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 53, Issue 4 P263-P272, Copyright © 1998 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

A multimodal assessment of sensory thresholds in aging

JC Stevens, LA Cruz, LE Marks and S Lakatos
John B. Pierce Laboratory, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. jstevens@jbpierce.org

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.

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