Age‐related decline in divided‐attention: from theoretical lab research to practical real‐life situations

Abstract

The purpose of this advanced review is to provide readers with an up-to-date synopsis of age-related changes in divided-attention abilities. An interdisciplinary approach is taken, supplying readers with evidence from very structured laboratory studies and findings from more ecological research studies that target real-life divided-attention situations (i.e., walking and talking). The review goes beyond the reported age-related declines in divided-attention abilities and offers the reader an overview of current cognitive (dual-task) training findings which suggest that these declines can be diminished with training. The contents of this review and the future directions proposed demonstrate that divided-attention research and its recent application to aging and mobility has become a major and fast growing scientific field of investigation. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:623-640. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1252 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Effects of Age and Syntactic Complexity on Speech Motor Performance

“…What is not clear is whether older speakers may also be more likely than young adults to be influenced by grammatical complexity in their speech motor control. Older adults have been reported to perform less well in divided attention studies (Fraser & Bherer, 2013), where finite neural resources are shared across multiple simultaneous tasks. Although concurrent language formulation and speech movement control cannot be considered divided attention tasks, it could be speculated that increasing linguistic demands may require greater processing resources, and lead to diminished stability in speech movement control in elderly speakers.…”

“…Based on earlier findings of increased lip movement variability in speakers who concurrently completed linguistically or cognitively challenging tasks (Dromey & Benson, 2003;Dromey & Bates, 2005), it was hypothesized that producing more complex utterances may tax the available resources and result in higher movement variability. On the basis of studies that have suggested decreasing motor control abilities in older adults (Mefferd et al, 2014;Benjamin, 1997;Harnsberger, Shrivastav, Brown, Jr., Rothman, & Hollien, 2008), as well as poorer multitasking performance (Fraser et al, 2013), it was hypothesized that producing more grammatically advanced utterances would result in relatively greater kinematic changes in older adults in comparison to younger speakers.…”

Does Combined Physical and Cognitive Training Improve Dual-Task Balance and Gait Outcomes in Sedentary Older Adults?

“…Although both younger and older adults may involve executive function processes to manage dual-task gait and balance, the literature suggests that the ability of older adults to manage such situations is reduced in comparison to younger adults (Woollacott and Shumway-Cook, 2002; Fraser et al, 2007; Li et al, 2012; Fraser and Bherer, 2013). Further, when active and sedentary older adults are compared, sedentary older adults demonstrate a greater risk of cognitive and physical declines that can influence executive functions and ultimately increase fall risk (Thibaud et al, 2011).…”

“…This risk increases in dual-task situations (Montero-Odasso et al, 2012). In addition, certain types of dual-task combinations can increase the dual-task interference (Fraser and Bherer, 2013). In particular cognitive tasks that are more executive in nature seem to interfere more with gait (Al-Yahya et al, 2011; Buracchio et al, 2011; Walshe et al, 2015).…”

Dual-task costs in aging are predicted by formal education

“…Dual-task research with older adults has shown that aging is accompanied by increased difficulty in performing different concurrent tasks across multiple domains (e.g., [1]). In particular, it has been shown that, in the aging population, dual-task situations not only interfere with controlled processes such as memorizing [2], but also with apparently automatized everyday activities such as speaking [3], driving [4, 5, 6], and walking [7, 8, 9, 2, 10, 11], although some differences have been observed depending on the automaticity and complexity of the tasks used (see [12], for a meta-analysis).…”