Crossmodal spatial distraction across the lifespan

Cluttered memory representations shape cognition in old age

“…For example, concurrent irrelevant information is disproportionately disruptive to older adults, slowing performance on simple tasks [98] and increasing errors in problem-solving [99]. Work also suggests that older adults retain previously concurrent distraction to solve new problems [100], to complete fragments [101], and even to answer general knowledge questions [102] (see also [31,54,[103][104][105][106]). Thus concurrent, task-irrelevant information is also part of what comprises representations formed by older adults.…”

Italian Children’s Accounts of the Lockdown: Insights and Perspectives

“…The fact that friends were missed so much during the first lockdown provides important information; namely, the technology-mediated relationships were perceived as insufficient surrogates for real-life friendships. When physically isolated from their friends, children missed – and indeed felt this loss – a number of social, emotional, and cognitive reciprocal developmental opportunities, in years crucial for individual’s development (see, e.g., Cavallina et al, 2018 ; Pedale et al, 2021 ). An example of this interpersonal dynamic lost during the lockdown can be observed in the code that reflected children missing hanging out and physical contact.…”

Crossmodal interference on counting performance: Evidence for shared attentional resources

“…Demonstrations of this phenomenon include crossmodal Stroop effects from a stream of auditory distractors on responses to a concurrent stream of visual targets (e.g., [137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144]). Also, McDonald et al [78], demonstrated that the occurrence of an irrelevant sound improved the detectability of a subsequent light when the target light appeared in the same location as the sound, while performance decreased when there was a spatial mismatch between the irrelevant sound and the target light (see also [124] for similar results with complex visual scenes). In our results, a crossmodal interference produced by the desynchronization between visual and auditory stimuli deteriorates the performance, increasing underestimation errors.…”

“…We hypothesize that this could happen even if the amount of auditory and visual stimuli is the same since the variation in numerosity is given illusorily by asynchrony, in other words the fact that the stimuli are not perceptually aligned could elicit the perception of a different numerosity, just as in Shams' illusion [35]. The second hypothesis, on the other hand, postulates that the task-irrelevant sounds presented asynchronously with the visual stimuli will disrupt the counting process (e.g., [53,124]): This disruption, by temporarily distracting the counting process, would result in missing some of the visual events and eventually in an undercount. Hence, the results can help us to glean a more complete picture on how asynchronous sounds can affect a visual counting task: if the participants tend to overcount, we can assume the first hypothesis (infiltration) to be true, while if they undercount, the second one (disruption) will be confirmed.…”