Aging and Shifts of Visual Attention in Saccadic Eye Movements

Abstract

The authors examined age-related differences in target discrimination before the saccade to investigate the influence of aging on the facilitation of target discrimination by shifts of attention. Older and younger adults made saccades toward a peripheral stimulus after its onset and discriminated the orientation of the stimulus. Mean saccadic latency was greater for older adults than for younger adults. Facilitation of target discrimination immediately before the saccades was found both in older and younger adults. These results suggest that aging affects the properties of saccades but does not affect the properties of attentional shifts immediately before a saccade.

Differential processing of natural scenes in posterior cortical atrophy and in Alzheimer’s disease, as measured with a saccade choice task

“…Although many studies have observed effects of aging on eye movements (Irving et al, 2006; Porter et al, 2010; Paquette and Fung, 2011; Ridderinkhof and Wijnen, 2011), it seems that automatic parameters (such as latencies in pro-saccade tasks) are barely influenced by aging (Abrams et al, 1998; Munoz et al, 1998; Kaneko et al, 2004). …”

Perimetric Evaluation of Saccadic Latency, Saccadic Accuracy, and Visual Threshold for Peripheral Visual Stimuli in Young Compared With Older Adults

“…Although saccadic latencies partly depend on physiologic processes in the retina, we found that they were increased in older compared with young adults at all locations, consistent with prior studies. 6,11,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] The mechanisms underlying these age-related increases in saccadic latencies remain unclear, but age-related cortical changes may contribute. Imaging studies have demonstrated significant age-related decreases in the volume of the gray matter of most cortical regions, 38 with the frontal lobes being most severely affected.…”

“…Many studies have evaluated the effects of senescence on saccades. Although saccadic velocity tends to be preserved, older adults' saccadic latencies are increased 6,11,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] and more variable 17,18,20 compared with those of younger adults. Furthermore, older adults' saccadic amplitudes are often smaller than those of younger adults, and this effect is exaggerated with increasing stimulus eccentricity.…”

Scene Categorization in Alzheimer's Disease: A Saccadic Choice Task

“…Ocular and visual information processing (from the retina through the visual pathway to the visual cortex) undergo changes in AD [ 50 , 67 ]. Some aspects of vision loss are typically due to advanced age [ 68 , 69 , 70 ], but automatic oculomotor parameters are minimally influenced by normal aging [ 71 ] and specific oculomotor impairments appear in AD [ 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 66 , 67 ] such as increased latency, reduced accuracy and peak velocity, smooth pursuit abnormalities and visual fixation instability [ 50 ]. However, other studies consider that the overall increase in saccade reaction time is related to increased motor and sensory processing time in AD [ 51 ] and may reflect a global processing speed deficit.…”