This is an example of the power of combining information from different senses, like seeing and hearing, or tasting and smelling. Research shows that multisensory stimulation can enhance people's performance by improving their accuracy and speeding their reaction times. Our laboratory is interested in investigating this phenomenon, particularly the effects of aging on multisensory perception.

Even healthy adults undergo changes in both their bodies and their brains as they get older. We take for granted a certain amount of deterioration in each of our senses. For example, we all expect to be wearing glasses by the time we are in our 60s. Interestingly, our ability to combine information from different senses actually increases at the same time information from the individual senses is deteriorating. The experiments that make up the PROMISE study investigate why these differences in multisensory interactions occur in healthy aging.