Effects of Aging and Dual-Task Demands on the Comprehension of Less Expected Sentence Continuations: Evidence From Pupillometry

Abstract

Prior studies on language processing in aging have shown that older adults experience integration difficulties for contextually unpredictable target words (as indicated by low cloze probabilities in prior ratings), and that such comprehension difficulties are more likely to occur under more demanding processing conditions (e.g., dual-task situations). However, these effects have primarily been demonstrated for conditions when cloze probability of the linguistic stimuli was very low. The question we asked here was do dual-task demands also impair comprehension when target words provide a good, but not perfect, match with prior context? We used a dual-task design, consisting of a sentence comprehension and secondary motor tracking task. Critical target words were those which were not perfectly predictable based on context (words with a cloze probability of 0.7), as opposed to words that were near perfectly predictable based on context (cloze probabilities of 0.99). As a measure to index online processing difficulty for less expected target words, we took into account participants’ pupil size. Separate mixed effects models were fit for language comprehension, motor tracking, and pupil size, showing the following: (1) dual-task demands led to age-related comprehension difficulties when target words were less expected (as opposed to very highly expected), (2) integration difficulty in older adults was related to cognitive overload as less expected sentence continuations progressed over time, resulting in behavioral trade-offs between language comprehension and motor tracking, and (3) lower levels of working memory were predictive of whether or not older adults experienced cognitive overload when processing less expected words. In sum, more demanding processing conditions lead to comprehension impairments when words are highly unpredictable based on context, as many prior studies showed. Comprehension impairments among older individuals also occur for conditions when words provide a good, but not perfect, match with prior context. Higher working memory capacity can alleviate such impairments in older adults, thereby suggesting that only high-WM older adults have sufficient cognitive resources to pre-activate words that complete a sentence context plausibly, but not perfectly.

Effects of verbal tasks on driving simulator performance

“…While this is a valid concern, we believe that it does capture an important aspect of driving, namely routine steering performance while driving. There is indeed considerable research showing the utility of this task for studying driving performance (Demberg, 2013 ; Häuser et al, 2019 ; Rajan et al, 2016 ; Reichel et al, 2014 ; Vogels et al, 2018 ). There is also considerable research recognizing the importance of combining studies of natural driving with better controlled lab-based studies in order to establish a complete picture of the factors underlying driving performance (Boyle & Lee, 2010 ; Bruck et al, 2020 ; Caird et al, 2014a , 2014b ; Guo, 2019 ; Underwood et al, 2011 ; Wijayaratna et al, 2019 ).…”

“…The dependent measure is the average distance between the driver-controlled cursor and the moving target. We chose this task because it provides a good proxy of a critical aspect of basic routine driving, namely continuously controlling the lateral position of the vehicle while driving, because it provides temporally fine-grain data about driving performance, and because it was previously used to investigate the interference between driving and language (Demberg, 2013 ; Häuser et al, 2019 ; Rajan et al, 2016 ; Vogels et al, 2020 ). This allowed us to measure the effects of a concurrent interactive verbal task at a high temporal resolution and thus provide a critical test of a psycholinguistic explanation of the well-documented interference between conversation and driving.…”

Sound Effects on Standing Postural Strategies in the Elderly via Frequency Analysis Approach

“…It indicated that changes in the COP displacement were due to dual-tasking from the experimental design. Performing the hand task in standing was a dual-task to postural control, which has been widely studied and shown difficulties of postural adjustments in the elderly [28,29]. The larger COP displacement and fast sway were observed in the medial-lateral direction, but not in the anterior-posterior direction.…”

Cognitive Control Beyond Single-Item Tasks: Insights from Pupillometry, Gaze, and Behavioral Measures

“…It has long been known that under dual-task conditions, the pupil initially dilates and then constricts, in parallel with behavioral results, that is, performance improvement followed by deterioration (Kahneman et al, 1967;Shiga & Ohkubo, 1978). Nowadays it is considered a stable finding that the pupil constricts in dual-task conditions (compared to a single-task baseline), while performance drops (Häuser et al, 2019;Karatekin et al, 2004;Recarte & Nunes, 2000;Recarte et al, 2008;Tapper et al, 2021). Two alternative interpretations have been proposed to explain these results: The first one posits that pupil constriction indicates capacity constraints due to cognitive overload (Kahneman, 1973;Tapper et al, 2021;Zekveld & Kramer, 2014;Zekveld et al, 2011).…”