Auditory attention is critical for selectively listening to speech from a single talker in a multitalker environment (e.g., Cherry, 1953). Listening in such situations is notoriously more difficult and more poorly encoded to long-term memory in older than in young adults (Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002). Recent work by Payne, Rogers, Wingfield, and Sekuler (2017) in young adults demonstrated a neural correlate of auditory attention in the directed dichotic listening task (DDLT), where listeners attend to one ear while ignoring the other. Measured using electroencephalography, differences in alpha band power (8-14 Hz) between left and right hemisphere parietal regions mark the direction to which auditory attention is focused. Little prior research has been conducted on alpha power modulations in older adults, particularly with regard to auditory attention directed toward speech stimuli. In the current study, an older adult sample was administered the DDLT and delayed recognition procedures used by Payne et al. (2017). Compared to young adults, older adults showed reduced selective attention in the DDLT, evidenced by a higher rate of intrusions from the unattended ear. Moreover, older adults did not exhibit attention-related alpha modulation evidenced by young adults, nor did their event-related potentials (ERPs) to recognition probes differentiate between attended or unattended probes. Older adults' delayed recognition did not reveal a pattern of suppression of unattended items evidenced by young adults. These results serve as evidence for an age-related decline in selective auditory attention, potentially mediated by age-related decline in the ability to modulate alpha oscillations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Vision is often characterized as a spatial sense, but what does that characterization imply about the relative ease of processing visual information distributed over time rather than over space? Three experiments addressed this question, using stimuli comprising random luminances. For some stimuli, individual items were presented sequentially, at 8 Hz; for other stimuli, individual items were presented simultaneously, as horizontal spatial arrays. For temporal sequences, subjects judged whether each of the last four luminances matched the corresponding luminance in the first four; for spatial arrays, they judged whether each of the right-hand four luminances matched the corresponding left-hand luminance. Overall, performance was far better with spatial presentations, even when the entire spatial array was presented for just tens of milliseconds. Experiment 2 demonstrated that there was no gain in performance from combining spatial and temporal information within a single stimulus. In a final experiment, particular spatial arrays or temporal sequences were made to recur intermittently, interspersed among, non-recurring stimuli. Performance improved steadily as particular stimulus exemplars recurred, with spatial and temporal stimuli being learned at equivalent rates. Logistic regression identified several shortcut strategies that subjects may have exploited while performing our task.

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