Age similarities in the inertial properties of attention

Abstract

Adult age differences in the mode of allocation of visual attention were investigated, using a visual search task with a circular display containing one target letter and seven distractor letters. In two experiments, a total of 56 younger adults (M = 20 years) and 56 older adults (M = 66 years) searched for a target appearing with equal probability at one of two cued locations. The first cue appeared 115 msec before display onset, and the second cue appeared with display onset; distance between the two cued locations was varied. Target identification performance indicated that attention was inertial, in that reaction time for second-cued targets was related either to the area of the portion of the visual field containing possible target locations or to the mean path length of a serial self-terminating search. There were no age-related decrements in the allocation of visual attention.In visual search and classification tasks, the effects of attention are reflected in the fact that items presented at some (attended) spatial locations are identified more efficiently than items presented at other locations. Although, in some instances, these effects are due to eye movements and to the decline in retinal acuity as a function of increasing eccentricity, attentional processing appears to be mediated by different neural systems than those underlying eye movements. Cortical regions, especially the frontal eye fields and the parietal cortex, appear to mediate the voluntary (attentional) orienting of the visual system, whereas reflexive visual orienting is mediated by midbrain structures (Rafal & Robertson, 1995).Behavioral investigations suggest that attending to specific spatial locations involves selectively allocating processing resources to items presented at the attended locations. It is well established that presenting a visual cue (such as a bar marker) prior to a visual display can facilitate the identification of items at the cued location and impair the identification of items at noncued locations (Eriksen, 1990). The cuing effects are evident when the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the cue and the display is sufficiently briefto prevent eye movements. In addition, the presentation of a spatial cue regarding target location facilitates performance even for single-item displays, which implies that the cue influences target identification by directing the allocation of processing

Location cuing and response time distributions in visual attention

“…Parameters s and t do not change with SOA, but m shows a consistent decrease with SOA. These parameter-SOA relationships were tested on the individual observer level for monotonic decreasing trends, using Kendall's t, which is an ordering coefficient based on paired comparisons (Gottlob & Madden, 1999;Kendall, 1970). Kendall's t ranges from Ϫ1 (strictly decreasing) to 1 (strictly increasing); random trends would have a mean score of 0.…”

Age-Related Differences in Localized Attentional Interference.

“…However, the effects of aging on LAI have not been examined directly. A study by Gottlob and Madden (1999) provides indirect evidence for age equivalence in such effects. In a pair of experiments, the authors examined the effects of spatial separation on the costs of shifting attention between cued locations.…”

“…Data produced no reliable Age ϫ Distance interactions, however, suggesting that effects of target separation were similar for older and younger adults. Gottlob and Madden (1999) interpreted the effects of distance in their results as potential evidence for serial self-terminating search of stimulus displays or for a gradient model of parallel attention. An alternative possibility is that the improvements in performance, which occurred with increased separation between targets, were the product of attentional interference resulting from biased competition like that described previously.…”

Auditory and visual distractor decrement in older worker manual assembly task learning: Impact of spatial reasoning, field independence, and level of education

“…Investigators have speculated that aging exacerbates the effects of distractors upon psychomotor performance and learning (Gottlob & Madden, 1999;Haarmann, Ashling, Davelaar, & Usher, 2005;Lawson, Guo, & Jiang, 2007;Schwerha, 2004;Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002;Verhaeghen, Vandenbroucke, & Dierckx, 1998). Given that our workforce is aging and workers 55 years of age or older are projected to represent 30.0% of the population and 36.8% of the American labor force (Fullerton, 1999), interest in this issue is mounting (Braddock, 1999).…”