Attentional capture and aging: Implications for visual search performance and oculomotor control.

Abstract

Two studies examined potential age-related differences in attentional capture. Subjects were instructed to move their eyes as quickly as possible to a color singleton target and to identify a small letter located inside it. On half the trials, a new stimulus (i.e., a sudden onset) appeared simultaneously with the presentation of the color singleton target. The onset was always a task-irrelevant distractor. Response times were lengthened, for both young and old adults, whenever an onset distractor appeared, despite the fact that subjects reported being unaware of the appearance of the abrupt onset. Eye scan strategies were also disrupted by the appearance of the onset distractors. On about 40% of the trials on which an onset appeared, subjects made an eye movement to the task-irrelevant onset before moving their eyes to the target. Fixations close to the onset were brief, suggesting parallel programming of a reflexive eye movement to the onset and goal-directed eye movement to the target. Results are discussed in terms of age-related sparing of the attentional and oculomotor processes that underlie attentional capture.The interaction of top-down or goal-directed and bottom-up or stimulus-driven influences on attentional control has become a central issue in the study of visual attention (Martin-Emerson & Kramer, 1997;Theeuwes, 1995;Yantis, 1996). When driving an automobile in unfamiliar surroundings, people spend a great deal of time intentionally directing their attention to other automobiles, pedestrians, and features of the roadway that are important to the task of driving. However, salient features of the environment, such as a brightly flashing neon sign on the side of the roadway or a loud and abrupt protestation from one of two children sitting in the backseat arguing about a favorite toy, also appear to grab or capture people's attention regardless of the intention to attend to these events.Indeed, the stimulus-driven capture of attention can have a positive influence on the task at hand, such as the sound of squealing tires alerting a driver to a potential accident ahead. However, attentional capture can also have negative consequences such as in the example above in which the driver is attending to the bright roadway sign rather than other automobiles. Analogs of these situations, that is, settings in which positive and negative consequences are realized with attentional capture, have been examined in the laboratory. This research was supported by Grant AG14966 from the National Institute on Aging. We would like to thank Angela Glass and Meredith Minear for their assistance in running the participants.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Arthur F. Kramer, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, 405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana. Illinois 61801. Electronic mail may be sent to akramer@s.psych.uiuc.edu.For example, Yantis and colleagues (Yantis & Hillstrom, 1994;Yantis & Jones, 1991;Yantis & Jonides, 1984 have conducted a number of studies in which subjects searched for a predefi...

Age-related differences in corrected and inhibited pointing movements

“…We did not Wnd this pattern in our paradigm, as there was no decrease in the accuracy of the inhibitory motor control with aging, although there was a general slowing and increased variability in both online and inhibitory movements to both perturbed and unperturbed targets. Our data does agree with previous Wndings on oculomotor inhibition where aging did not result in increased capture eVects (Eenshuistra et al 2004;Colcombe et al 2003;Kramer et al 1999). Interestingly, Kramer et al (2000) found that both elderly and young participants misdirected their saccades in an equivalent proportion of trials when awareness of the distracter was low, but when the distracter was brighter than the search stimuli older subjects were less eYcient in inhibiting saccades towards these distracters.…”

“…Based on the studies reviewed here we would expect elderly subjects to be delayed in the onset of their online correction to a target perturbation (see Sarlegna 2006), but possibly be accurate in carrying out such a correction. Regarding the movement inhibition in the stop condition, we would expect impairment with age, yet the oculomotor capture results by Kramer et al (1999; would not support such an assumption.…”

“…Moreover, older adults have greater diYculty in intentionally suppressing attentional allocation to onset distracters (Pratt and Bellomo 1999) and are more susceptible to attentional capture by transient events in the periphery of the visual Weld (Lincort et al 1997). It is surprising then that Kramer et al (1999Kramer et al ( , 2000 found equivalent patterns of oculomotor capture for old and young adults in that both groups misdirected their eyes to the task irrelevant onsets on an equivalent number of trials. Colcombe et al (2003) further extended these Wndings of age equivalence from onset to colour singleton distracters.…”

Age-related decline in the reflexive component of overt gaze following

“…The proportion of saccades towards the distractor and the difference in search time for valid and invalid trials are used as measures of oculomotor capture. Although several studies have found general age-related deficits in inhibition (de Fockert, Ramchurn, van Velzen, Bergstroem, & Bunce, 2009;Hasher & Zacks, 1988), Kramer et al (1999) found that young and older adults made equal number of saccades towards the distractor thus suggesting that oculomotor control was age irrelevant. However, subsequent studies have shown an age-related effect if the distractor was extra salient (Kramer, Hahn, Irwin, & Theeuwes, 2000).…”

Inhibitory inefficiency and failures of intention activation: Age-related decline in the control of saccadic eye movements.

“…There is ample evidence that humans and other organisms have an automatic response tendency to direct both their attention (see for a review, Yantis, 1998) and their eyes (Roberts et al, 1994;Theeuwes, Kramer, Hahn, & Irwin, 1998) toward abrupt visual onsets. Kramer et al (1999) examined the effect of abrupt onset distractors on goal-directed eye movements in a visual search task. Younger and older adults misdirected their eyes to the distractor onset on an equally large portion of the trials before moving their eyes to the target.…”