Age-related changes in selective attention and perceptual load during visual search.

Abstract

Three visual search experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that age differences in selective attention vary as a function of perceptual load (E. A. Maylor & N. Lavie, 1998). Under resourcelimited conditions (Experiments 1 and 2), the distraction from irrelevant display items generally decreased as display size (perceptual load) increased. This perceptual load effect was similar for younger and older adults, contrary to the findings of Maylor and Lavie. Distraction at low perceptual loads appeared to reflect both general and specific inhibitory mechanisms. Under more data-limited conditions (Experiment 3), an age-related decline in selective attention was evident, but the age difference was not attributable to capacity limitations as predicted by the perceptual load theory.An age-related decline is frequently evident in the overall efficiency of visual search performance, but the selective allocation of attention to task-relevant information, expressed as changes in performance associated with target-location and target-identity cues, is in many respects constant as a function of age (Hartley, 1992;Madden & Plude, 1993;McDowd & Shaw, 2000). Selection performance on nonsearch measures of attention, including Stroop, negative-priming, and response compatibility tasks, has exhibited variability in age-related patterns of stability and decline as a function of specific task demands. Investigations of response compatibility effects, for example, have found that the increase in reaction time (RT) associated with response-incompatible flankers is greater for older adults than for younger

Pain and Attention: Attentional Disruption or Distraction?

“…Participants were screened on percentages of error rates because these might suggest that they operate closer to data-limited conditions than to resourcelimited conditions. 24 To keep error rates low, participants could only enter the study when errors occurred in less than 20% of the trials for each display size in the practice condition. Participants were paid on completion of the experiment.…”

“…In the high load condition, 6 letters were presented, arranged around an imaginary circle, consisting of 1 target assigned randomly to 1 of the positions and 5 non-targets picked randomly from the non-target letter set to fill up the leftover spaces. Possible non-target letters were B, D, G, J, Q, R, F, K, M, T, V and Z (partially adapted from Madden and Langley 24 ). All letters were presented in uppercase in white against a black background.…”

“…A visual search task was used, which has been demonstrated to invoke controlled search with high demands on attentional capacity 33,37,38 that exceed capacity limits as reflected in reduced processing of taskirrelevant information. 19,20,24,25 The first experiment was designed to assess whether pain affects task performance, ie, the primary task paradigm, by presenting the visual search task in a mixed design, with unpredictably varying low and high load stimuli within blocks of stimuli, so subjects cannot strategically prepare themselves. By doing so, attention could not be allocated differently to low versus high load stimuli.…”

Attentional disregulation: A benefit for implicit memory.

“…This is particularly notable in cognitive gerontology, in part because a substantial literature suggests that older adults are more easily distracted by concurrently presented, but irrelevant, information than are younger adults (e.g., Madden & Langley, 2003; but see Winocur & Moscovitch, 1983). Older adults' susceptibility to concurrent and recently relevant distraction impairs performance on a variety of tasks including speech comprehension and reading (Carlson, Hasher, Zacks, & Connelly, 1995;Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002), attention tasks such as Stroop (e.g., Cohn, Dustman, & Bradford, 1984), visual search (Scialfa, Esau, & Joffe, 1998) and flanker tasks (e.g., Zeef, Sonke, Kok, Buiten, & Kenemans, 1996), and both explicit and implicit memory tasks (Hartman & Hasher, 1991).…”

Effect of action video games on the spatial distribution of visuospatial attention.

“…Groups thought to have diminished attentional abilities, such as the elderly (Ball et al, 1988;Madden & Langley, 2003;Maylor & Lavie, 1998;Plude & Hoyer, 1986;Scialfa, Esau, & Joffe, 1998) and young children (Akhtar & Enns, 1989;Enns & Cameron, 1987;Enns & Girgus, 1985;Plude, Enns, & Brodeur, 1994;Rueda et al, 2004), typically demonstrate larger effects of distracting information on attentional tasks than normal adult controls, indicating an effect of age on the determinants of visual selective attention. Similarly, a host of data indicate that the control of visual selective attention decreases in most pathological populations, including frontal patients (Husain & Kennard, 1997), Alzheimer's patients (Levinoff, Li, Murtha, & Chertkow, 2004;Tales, Haworth, Nelson, Snowden, & Wilcock, 2005;Tales, Muir, Jones, Bayer, & Snowden, 2004), children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Shalev & Tsal, 2003), and neglect patients (Russell, Malhotra, & Husain, 2004;Sprenger, Kompf, & Heide, 2002;Vivas, Humphreys, & Fuentes, 2003).…”