Age Effects on Distraction in a Visual Task Requiring Fast Reactions: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

We investigated the effects of distractors in older and younger participants in choice and simple reaction time tasks with concurrent registration of event-related potentials. In the task the participants had to prevent a disk from falling into a bin after a color or luminosity change (target stimuli). Infrequently, task-irrelevant stimuli (schematic faces or threatening objects) were superimposed on the target stimuli (distractors), or the bin disappeared which required no response (Nogo trials). Reaction time was delayed to the distractors, but this effect was similar in the two age groups. As a robust age-related difference, in the older group a large anterior positivity and posterior negativity emerged to the distractors within the 100–200 ms post-stimulus range, and these components were larger for schematic faces than for threatening objects. sLORETA localized the age-specific effect to the ventral stream of the visual system and to anterior structures considered as parts of the executive system. The Nogo stimuli elicited a late positivity (Nogo P3) with longer latency in the older group. We interpreted the age-related differences as decreased but compensated resistance to task-irrelevant change of the target stimuli.

Mechanisms of spatial contextual cueing in younger and older adults

“…According to that assumption, N2pc to repeated configurations increases as a result of participants being better at using contextual information either to suppress irrelevant information (Luck & Hillyard, 1994) or to enhance processing of the target (Eimer, 1996). Because inhibiting irrelevant stimuli is more challenging for older adults (Gaál et al, 2020;Kojouharova et al, 2020), our results could be interpreted as attentional selection contributing to the contextual cueing effect in younger but not in older adults. Nevertheless, there is some indication that an additional attentional process might be taking place in the older group.…”

“…Besides our main aim of determining whether early or late processes contribute to the contextual cueing effect in different age groups, some additional tentative predictions could be made regarding the two accounts for N2pc. For older adults, inhibiting visual distractors is more difficult compared with younger adults (Gaál et al, 2020; Kojouharova et al, 2020). Because of that, in the spatial contextual cueing paradigm, they may process more information about the spatial configurations, and then use this additional information to improve performance on the task for the repeated configurations resulting in a larger contextual cueing effect.…”

Older Adults Automatically Detect Age of Older Adults’ Photographs: A Visual Mismatch Negativity Study

“…As a possibility, younger participants concentrated more effectively on the task-field, e.g., they were more efficient in inhibiting the task-irrelevant part of the visual field. On the one hand, this explanation corresponds to the compromised inhibitory processes in some fields of aging research (e.g., Hasher and Zacks, 1988 ), the larger effect of age-related distraction (e.g., Karthaus et al, 2020 ), and increased ERP effects of irrelevant stimuli ( Kojouharova et al, 2020 ). On the other hand, spatial attention is relatively preserved in the elderly (for a discussion see Lawrence et al, 2018 ), and as an example, in the flanker task there is no robust age-related difference ( De Bruin and Della Sala, 2018 ).…”