Auditory distraction in young and middle-aged adults: a behavioural and event-related potential study

Abstract

Cognitive tasks involving distraction are associated with an early age-related decline in performance. Involuntary shifts in attention to irrelevant stimulus features and subsequent reorientation were studied in young and middle-aged subjects focussing on behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) measures. Subjects were asked to discriminate between equiprobable short and long auditory stimuli. Irrelevant rare frequency deviations prolonged reaction times (RT's), while an age-related effect on RT's was not observed. In contrast, notably after short deviant tones the error rate was considerably increased in the middle-aged subjects. ERP measures after deviant stimuli elicited a sequence of mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a and reorienting negativity (RON). The latency and amplitude of the MMN did not differ between age groups indicating an unchanged deviance detection. However, the consecutive process of attention orientation (P3a) was delayed and the subsequent reorienting (RON) to the primary task was strongly attenuated in the middle-aged subjects. After short deviants the RON was virtually absent in the middle-aged subjects, which might account for the observed decline of accuracy.

ERP correlates of auditory goal-directed behavior of younger and older adults in a dynamic speech perception task

“…In noisy environments, however, they run into difficulties committing more errors when a sudden change in speaker location occurred. The present results also correspond to the findings of previous auditory distraction studies that found a higher degree of distraction in older adults when an irregular change in a task-irrelevant feature of a target stimulus occurred (e.g., [46,15,39,61]). …”

“…As could be expected from the inhibitory deficit hypothesis, older adults are more distracted by irregular deviant stimuli than younger adults [46,15,39,61]. The analysis of the deviant-related ERPs revealed that different cognitive subprocesses contribute to this increase in distractibility, comprising deficits in encoding or retention of sensory information [1,9,15,17,42,54,61] and in attentional orienting [18,28,46,39].…”

“…The analysis of the deviant-related ERPs revealed that different cognitive subprocesses contribute to this increase in distractibility, comprising deficits in encoding or retention of sensory information [1,9,15,17,42,54,61] and in attentional orienting [18,28,46,39]. Also, a delayed and incomplete re-orientation of attention to the relevant stimulus feature has been observed [46,39,31,32].…”

Increased Cognitive Functioning in Symptomatic Huntington's Disease As Revealed by Behavioral and Event-Related Potential Indices of Auditory Sensory Memory and Attention

“…The NMDA-receptor system has been found to modulate the MMN (Javitt et al, 1996;KreitschmannAndermahr et al, 2001;Umbricht et al, 2002). Supporting this, conditions like Alzheimer's disease, stroke, schizophrenia as well as conditions of normal aging, known to decrease the MMN (Pekkonen, 2000;Ilvonen et al, 2003;Mager et al, 2005;Ahveninen et al, 2006), are accompanied by dysfunctions in the NMDA-receptor system. Especially the NR2A and NR2B receptor subunits are affected in these conditions (Villmann and Becker, 2007).…”

BDNF Val66Met polymorphism and goal-directed behavior in healthy elderly — evidence from auditory distraction

“…Similarly, attentional shifting processes occurring in the second stage, which are reflected by the frontal P3 (P3a) (e.g. Beste et al, 2008;Escera et al, 2000;Schröger, 1996), have been shown to decline with aging (Fjell and Walhovd, 2004;Mager et al, 2005). On the other hand, there is also evidence suggesting the P3a to be a correlate of allocation of attentional processing resources (Polich, 2007), and as an adjustment of mental resources (Getzmann and Falkenstein, 2011).…”