RESUMO
The main manefestation of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is cognitive decline. An important reason for this decline lies in the defects of vision and hearing. Stimuli information from vision and hearing are transmitted in different modes, resulting in a time difference between the receiving and encoding of these different types of information. Normal aging individuals are well capable of integrating information from different sensory modalities and respond to it, whereas AD patients cannot integrate such visual and auditory information very well due to pathological aging and impaired audiovisual integration ability. A series of studies have investigated the impaired audiovisual integration in AD patients, focusing on their behavioral performance and the underlying neurophysiological mechanism. Their findings indicate that the impaired audiovisual integration in AD patients could be caused by pathological changes in the superior temporal sulcus, as well as anomaly in brain connectivity and brain activity pattern and so on, which provide insights into potential intervention and prevention methods. This paper reviews the physiological, pathological, and behavioral manifestations of impaired audiovisual integration in AD patients, summarizes some intervention and prevention methods, and provides prospect for future research.