Age-related differences in enhancement and suppression of neural activity underlying selective attention in matched young and old adults

Haring, Anna; Zhuravleva, Tatyana Y.; Alperin, Brittany R.; Rentz, Dorene M.; Holcomb, Phillip J.; Daffner, Kirk R.

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2013.01.003

Cited by 30 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(70 reference statements)

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“…The effects of divided attention at encoding in young adults are strikingly similar to the pattern of cognitive impairment commonly observed among older adults, who show increased processing of distracters relative to their young counterparts (Campbell, Grady, Ng, & Hasher, 2012;de Fockert, Ramchurn, Van Velzen, Bergström, & Bunce, 2009;Haring et al, 2013;May, 1999), accompanied by impaired recall of target items (e.g. Gazzaley, Cooney, Rissman, & D'Esposito, 2005).…”

mentioning

confidence: 52%

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

Weeks

Hasher

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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Older adults show implicit memory for previously seen distraction, an effect attributed to poor attentional control. It is unclear whether this effect results from lack of control over encoding during the distraction task, lack of retrieval constraint during the test task, or both. In the present study, we simulated poor distraction control in young adults using divided attention at encoding, at retrieval, at both times, or not at all. The encoding task was a 1-back task on pictures with distracting superimposed letter strings, some of which were words. The retrieval task was a word fragment completion task testing implicit memory for the distracting words. Attention was divided using an auditory odd digit detection task. Dividing attention at encoding, but not at retrieval, resulted in significant priming for distraction, which suggests that control over encoding processes is a primary determinant of distraction transfer in populations with low inhibitory control (e.g. older adults).

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confidence: 52%

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

Weeks

Hasher

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…Fillers accounted for the remainder of the stimuli presented. Task demands were made easier for old subjects to help minimize group differences in performance [23]. Young subjects responded to 5 target letters and old subjects responded to 4 target letters.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does the age-related “anterior shift” of the P3 reflect an inability to habituate the novelty response?

Alperin

Mott

Holcomb

et al. 2014

Neuroscience Letters

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Old adults often generate larger anterior neural responses than young adults when carrying out task requirements. A common finding in the ERP literature is an "anterior shift" of the P3b to targets. Utilizing principal component analysis (PCA), we recently demonstrated that rather than the P3b moving anteriorly, old adults generate a large P3a that temporally overlaps with their P3b. A dominant hypothesis for the age-related increase in anterior P3 is the failure to habituate the brain’s novelty response to rare targets. We tested this hypothesis in young and old adults by comparing the amplitude of the PCA factor representing P3a to targets presented in the first versus last of eight blocks of a visual oddball task. If, unlike young adults, old adults are unable to habituate a novelty response, one would expect 1) the P3a amplitude to decrease between the first and last blocks for young, but not old subjects and 2) the difference in P3a amplitude between young and old subjects to be greater in the last than the first block. Our results indicate the amplitude of the P3a was larger in old adults than young adults. However, this effect was not modulated by block. These findings argue against the hypothesis that an age-related increase in the P3a to targets reflects an inability of old subjects to habituate a novelty response. An alternative hypothesis is that the augmented P3a indexes the increased utilization of frontal executive functions to provide compensatory scaffolding to carry out a task.

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“…Older individuals tend to exhibit larger behavioral costs in response to distracters on Stroop [10–12], Simon [13, 14], reading-with-distraction [15, 16], and listening-in-noise [17, 18] tasks. Moreover, older adults demonstrate reduced ability to suppress neural activity in response to task-irrelevant stimuli in studies employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERPs) [2, 6, 8, 9, 19–22]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased Early Processing of Task-Irrelevant Auditory Stimuli in Older Adults

et al. 2016

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The inhibitory deficit hypothesis of cognitive aging posits that older adults’ inability to adequately suppress processing of irrelevant information is a major source of cognitive decline. Prior research has demonstrated that in response to task-irrelevant auditory stimuli there is an age-associated increase in the amplitude of the N1 wave, an ERP marker of early perceptual processing. Here, we tested predictions derived from the inhibitory deficit hypothesis that the age-related increase in N1 would be 1) observed under an auditory-ignore, but not auditory-attend condition, 2) attenuated in individuals with high executive capacity (EC), and 3) augmented by increasing cognitive load of the primary visual task. ERPs were measured in 114 well-matched young, middle-aged, young-old, and old-old adults, designated as having high or average EC based on neuropsychological testing. Under the auditory-ignore (visual-attend) task, participants ignored auditory stimuli and responded to rare target letters under low and high load. Under the auditory-attend task, participants ignored visual stimuli and responded to rare target tones. Results confirmed an age-associated increase in N1 amplitude to auditory stimuli under the auditory-ignore but not auditory-attend task. Contrary to predictions, EC did not modulate the N1 response. The load effect was the opposite of expectation: the N1 to task-irrelevant auditory events was smaller under high load. Finally, older adults did not simply fail to suppress the N1 to auditory stimuli in the task-irrelevant modality; they generated a larger response than to identical stimuli in the task-relevant modality. In summary, several of the study’s findings do not fit the inhibitory-deficit hypothesis of cognitive aging, which may need to be refined or supplemented by alternative accounts.

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Age-related differences in enhancement and suppression of neural activity underlying selective attention in matched young and old adults

Cited by 30 publications

References 50 publications

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

Does the age-related “anterior shift” of the P3 reflect an inability to habituate the novelty response?

Increased Early Processing of Task-Irrelevant Auditory Stimuli in Older Adults

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