Dynamic adjustments of attentional control in healthy aging.

Abstract

In standard attentional control tasks, interference effects are reduced following incongruent trials compared to following congruent trials, a phenomenon known as the congruency sequence effect (CSE). Typical explanations of this effect suggest the CSE is due to changes in levels of control across adjacent trials. This interpretation has been questioned by the finding that older adults, individuals with impaired attentional control systems, have been shown to produce larger CSEs in the Stroop task compared to younger adult controls. In two experiments, we investigate the generality of this finding by examining how the CSE changes in healthy aging in three standard attentional control tasks, Stroop, Simon and flanker, while controlling for additional confounds that have plagued some of the past literature. In both experiments, older adult participants exhibited a larger CSE in the Stroop task, replicating recent research, but smaller CSEs in both the Simon and flanker paradigms. These results are interpreted as reflecting a pathway priming mechanism in the Stroop task but a control adjustment process in Simon and flanker. Hence, there appears to be different mechanisms underlying the CSE which are engaged based on the type of attentional selection that is required by the task. More generally, these results question the use of the CSE in the Stroop task as a measure of dynamic adjustments in attentional control and highlight the importance of consideration of task-specific control systems underlying the CSE.

Cognitive control across adolescence: Dynamic adjustments and mind-wandering.

“…Based on previous findings (Ambrosi et al, 2016;Cragg, 2016;Iani et al, 2014) we expected to find the CSE in every age group. Furthermore, based on models of cognitive control development (Shulman et al, 2016) the CSE was predicted to increase in magnitude across the age groups, reflecting greater deployment of top-down control in response to changing task demands as a function of age, in line with previous studies that interpreted larger CSEs in the Simon and flanker tasks as reflecting better control modulation (e.g., Aschenbrenner & Balota, 2017). An alternative interpretation of CSE magnitude could be that a larger modulation actually means that there is less cognitive control deployed to tackle conflict in the first place, leading to incongruence impacting performance to a greater extent, therefore smaller CSEs might be an indicator of optimal performance.…”

“…Therefore, it is important to control for the effects of stimulus repetitions and contingency learning if one wants to interpret the CSE in terms of control adjustments. Notably, recent studies have found the CSE pattern even after removing feature repetitions and target-distracter contingencies from the trial sequence, lending credence to the view that the CSE can occur in the absence of learning and memory confounds, presumably as a function of control adjustments (e.g., Aschenbrenner & Balota, 2017;Duthoo, Abrahamse, Braem, Boehler, & Notebaert, 2014b;Schmidt & Weissman, 2014;Weissman, Colter, Drake, & Morgan, 2015).…”

“…Consequently, this study was designed to investigate changes in dynamic control adjustments across adolescence using confound-minimized variants of two commonly used conflict tasks, the flanker (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974) and the Simon task (Simon, 1969), in four age groups: early adolescence (12-13-year-olds), mid-adolescence (14-15), late adolescence (18-20), and young adulthood (25-27). These two tasks were chosen because a recent study (Aschenbrenner & Balota, 2017) concluded that the CSE in these two paradigms likely reflects a cognitive control adjustment mechanism, whereas the CSE found in the colour-word Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) might reflect a priming-related mechanism.…”

“…Following the design used by Aschenbrenner & Balota (2017), the following sequence of events occurred on each trial, in both tasks: a fixation cross was displayed for 500 ms, followed by a blank screen for 200 ms. After this, the target stimulus was presented for 3000 ms, or until a response was made. Participants had to indicate the direction of the target arrows by pressing the 2, 4, 6, or 8 keys on the numeric keypad to respond down, left, right, or up, respectively.…”

Investigating Age-Related Neural Compensation During Emotion Perception Using Electroencephalography

“…This is consistent with previous findings that older participants exhibit significantly poorer performance in perceiving low-intensity happiness from older faces (e.g., [13]), but relatively intact performance on prototypical emotions displayed by younger adults [7][8][9]51]. Furthermore, it has recently been found that older adults are associated with larger congruency sequence effect [52,53] in the Stroop task compared to younger adult controls [54]. In future studies, it will be interesting to investigate the trial-to-trial carryover effect in emotion perception and to see how typical aging affects this interference effect.…”