Endogenous visuospatial precuing effects as a function of age and task demands

Abstract

This experiment examined the effects of age on processing resource capacity using an endogenous visuospatial precuing task and four levels of resource demands. Younger and older adults made speeded two-choice responses to dim and bright targets that required a line-orientation or a lexical decision. An arrow preceding target onset served as an attentional cue to affect the spatial distribution of resources. It provided accurate information about the target's location on most trials and inaccurate or neutral information on the remaining trials. Although older adults were slower than younger adults under all conditions and were more affected by the resource demand manipulations, they exhibited a pattern of precuing effects across conditions that was similar to that of the younger adults. Results are consistent with the idea that the visuospatial attention system remains relatively unaffected by aging. However, the data speak against the idea that capacity reduction is the primary contributor to age-related slowing.One of the most pervasive findings in cognitive aging research is that there is an increased slowness of behavior with increased age. As Wickens, Braune, and Stokes (1987) noted; the evidence appears unambiguous that there is a slowing in speed of performance for individuals above the age of 25 on information-processing tasks in which response latency (RT) is the dependent measure. This slowing has been attributed to age effects at nearly all stages of information processing (see Kausler,

Reflexive orienting in response to short- and long-duration gaze cues in young, young-old, and old-old adults

“…Moreover, the age-related stability of gaze-triggered orienting likely has important implications for joint attention in older adults. With evidence that age is associated with reductions in attentional capacity (Craik, Luo, & Sakuta, 2010; Kim & Giovanello, 2011; Tellinghuisen et al, 1996), reflexive gaze-triggered orienting, which puts little demand on processing resources (Xu, Zhang, & Geng, 2011), could be important for helping older adults efficiently process the attentional viewpoint of others. Gaze-triggered orienting likely continues to be important for learning and social interactions in later life.…”

“…Studies of arrow-triggered orienting have primarily assessed volitional orienting to informative arrows and found orienting to be largely intact with age (Folk & Hoyer, 1992; Hartley, Kieley, & Slabach, 1990; Lincourt, Folk, & Hoyer, 1997; Tellinghuisen, Zimba, & Robin, 1996). In a recent study (Langley, Friesen, Saville, & Ciernia, 2011), we examined reflexive orienting in response to uninformative central arrows and found validity effects at short cue-target SOAs (100 and 300 ms) that were evident even when the cue did not overlap with the target (Experiment 2).…”

Effects of Aging on Visual Attentional Focusing

“…At short SOAs, the allocation of attention is exogenously elicited by the physical properties of the cue; at longer SOAs, the allocation of attention may be endogenously driven by individual expectancies according to the symbolic meaning of the cue [14,15] . Results from attentional orienting studies with older individuals are mixed and have led to the hypotheses of age constancy as well as of differential aging effects for the exogenous and the endogenous allocation of visual spatial attention [16,17] . One relevant age-related difference seems to be the lower ability of older adults to endogenously override the exogenous allocation of attention elicited by direct cues [18] .…”

Spatial Cuing in a Stereoscopic Display: Attention Remains "Depth-Aware" with Age

“…Many studies of age-related differences for attentional tasks such as visual search (Greenwood, Parasuraman, & Alexander, 1997;Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 1996;Plude & Doussard-Roosevelt, 1989), inhibitory processing (Faust & Balota, 1997;Hartley, 1993;Kramer, Humphrey, Larish, Logan, & Strayer, 1994;Madden, 1983), the orienting of spatial attention (Folk & Hoyer, 1992;Madden, Connelly, & Pierce, 1994;Tellinghuisen, Zimba, & Robin, 1996), and dividing attention between noncontiguous spatial locations demonstrate relatively intact, though slower, visual spatial attention in 2-D in older observers. However, we know nothing about how (or if) the allocation of attention in 3-D space changes with age.…”