Aging and inhibition: Beyond a unitary view of inhibitory processing in attention.

Abstract

The authors examined the question of whether a decrease in the efficiency of inhibitory processing with aging is a general phenomenon. Thirty elderly and 32 young adults performed a series of tasks from which the authors could extract measures of inhibitory function. The tasks and task components included response compatibility, negative priming, stopping, spatial precuing, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), and the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ). Only limited evidence for age-related differences in inhibitory function was obtained. Old adults had more difficulty than young adults in stopping an overt response and adopting new rules in a categorization task. However, elderly and young adults produced equivalent negative priming effects, response compatibility effects, spatial precuing effects, and self-reported cognitive failures. The findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between aging, inhibitory processes, and neuroanatomical and physiological function.A dominant view in the aging literature is that cognitive decline in later life is the result of a progressive and generalized slowing of information-processing activities (Birren, 1974;Cerella, 1990;Salthouse, 1992). Much of the evidence for such a view has been provided through reanalyses of existing data sets (Cerella, 1985b;Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith, 1991;Salthouse, 1985). Examination oflarge numbers of tasks has suggested that reaction times (RTs) of elderly subjects can be described as simple linear or nonlinear functions of young subjects' RTs, without reference to the specific nature of the tasks. Although this generalized-slowing view provides a good account of RT data in a multitude of studies (but see Baron & Mattila, 1989;Fisk, Fisher, & Rogers, 1992), such a view has, for the most part, been descriptive rather than theoretical in nature (but see Cerella, 1990).An important question is what processes or mechanisms are responsible for this generalized slowing that occurs during aging? One relatively recent proposal that could provide the theoretical basis for generalized slowing concerns inhibitory function. Hasher and Zacks (1988; see also Zacks & Hasher, in press) suggested that age-related processing deficits in a variety of cog- We are indebted to Susan Gass for assistance in data collection, with special thanks to Heather Pringle for her invaluable assistance in data management and project organization. We express our appreciation to Tram Neill and Joan McDowd for their helpful comments on a draft of this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Arthur F. Kramer, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, 405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801. nitive skills could be accounted for by a decrease in the efficiency of inhibitory processing during aging. More specifically, inefficient inhibition could result in ineffective selective attention, which could, in turn, result in the intrusion of task irrelevant information into working memory. The consequences of the entrance of...

Event-Related Brain Potentials in the Study of Inhibition: Cognitive Control, Source Localization and Age-Related Modulations

“…Anguera and Gazzaley (2012) identified a later latency peak onset for unsuccessful inhibition 36 trials in both N2 and P3. Only the P3 latency correlated with the SSRT, which is similar to other studies of age-related effects that used the Stop-signal task (Kramer et al 1994). These results suggest the latency of the P3 might be an index of age-related inhibition changes.…”

“…Although these results point to a general slowing that affects inhibition processes, Vallesi (2011) In the Stop-Signal paradigm, a greater SSRT has been identified for older adults, which suggests an age-related deficit in inhibition that is not explained by a general decline in processing speed (Kramer et al 1994;Andres et al 2008). In an ERP experiment, Anguera and Gazzaley (2012) studied age-related modulations of the N2 and P3 associated with inhibition in a visual Stop-signal task and determined that the older adults' greater SSRT was associated with the P3 latency but not with the P3 amplitude or the N2 latency or amplitude.…”

Specificity of inhibitory deficits in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease

“…With regard to semantic processes, difficulties inhibiting the reading and processing of irrelevant information embedded in a text [26,36,44], suppressing no longer relevant information produced following a reading task [49] or restraining the production of a word that is strongly induced by the context of a sentence [6] have frequently been reported. Motor inhibition deficits were also observed on the stop-signal task [66,74], the go/no-go task [80] and the antisaccade task [18]. Finally, decreased directed forgetting abilities in working and episodic memory have also been reported [9,106].…”

“…Finally, decreased directed forgetting abilities in working and episodic memory have also been reported [9,106]. However, a negative effect of aging on suppression abilities has not been systematically observed (see [63] for the Stroop task, [27,66,67,96,102] for negative priming and [48] for inhibition of return), or is sometimes explained by more basic cognitive variables, such as a decrease in processing speed [88,89,101], fluid intelligence abilities [93] or circadian preferences [59; see 105].…”

“…However, at this time, very few studies have explored a series of inhibitory / interference resolution processes in the same group of subjects in order to formally determine the generality of impairments in these populations. In that context, Kramer et al [66] observed that elderly subjects had more difficulties than young subjects in stopping an overt response and adopting new rules in a categorization task, although both groups produced equivalent negative priming effects, response compatibility effects, spatial precuing effects, and self-reported cognitive failures. More recently, Charlot [20; see also 21] assessed inhibitory / interference resolution functioning in working memory using tasks exploring the access, deletion and restraint functions, and demonstrated that the effects of aging are weaker on the access function than on the other two suppression functions.…”