The Effect of Aging on the Dynamics of Reactive and Proactive Cognitive Control of Response Interference

Abstract

A prime-target interference task was used to investigate the effects of cognitive aging on reactive and proactive control after eliminating frequency confounds and feature repetitions from the cognitive control measures. We used distributional analyses to explore the dynamics of the two control functions by distinguishing the strength of incorrect response capture and the efficiency of suppression control. For reactive control, within-trial conflict control and between-trial conflict adaption were analyzed. The statistical analysis showed that there were no reliable between-trial conflict adaption effects for either young or older adults. For within-trial conflict control, the results revealed that older adults showed larger interference effects on mean RT and mean accuracy. Distributional analyses showed that the decline mainly stemmed from inefficient suppression rather than from stronger incorrect responses. For proactive control, older adults showed comparable proactive conflict resolution to young adults on mean RT and mean accuracy. Distributional analyses showed that older adults were as effective as younger adults in adjusting their responses based on congruency proportion information to minimize automatic response capture and actively suppress the direct response activation. The results suggest that older adults were less proficient at suppressing interference after conflict was detected but can anticipate and prevent inference in response to congruency proportion manipulation. These results challenge earlier views that older adults have selective deficits in proactive control but intact reactive control.

Working memory capacity mediates the relationship between removal and fluid intelligence

“…While providing a cue during updating disentangles the removal, encoding, and attention reorientation confound, it can be argued that the results of and the present set of studies may also be interpreted in terms of individual differences in the general capacity for cue utilization. This hypothesis would assume that participants may differ primarily in their ability to use cues to anticipate task demands and prepare for updating rather than their efficiency to perform the actual removal operation itself (see, e.g., Brouwers, Wiggins, Helton, O'Hare, & Griffin, 2016;Xiang et al, 2016). While we acknowledge that individuals may differ in the effectiveness of their cue utilization, we argue against the notion that this cue-utilization hypothesis can explain present findings.…”

A cross-sectional study on interference control: age affects reactive control but not proactive control

“…The age-related decline was observed in alternation trials disregarding prior sequence characteristics, suggesting that age only affected just-in-time selection. The reactive control, but not proactive control, declined with aging (Xiang et al, 2016). That challenged earlier views of age can only affect proactive control (Botvinick et al, 2001;Braver & West, 2015).…”

“…Recent studies reported that old adults had selective difficulty in memorizing content-context associations but not in isolated contents (Artuso et al, 2017;Artuso & Palladino, 2011;McCormick-Huhn et al, 2018;Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008;Pelegrina et al, 2012) and the delays in selection were longer with a function of memory load (Artuso et al, 2017), implying that proactive control was impaired with aging. But Xiang et al (2016) reported that older adults had selective deficits in reactive control.…”

Attentional Reorientation and Inhibition Adjustment in a Verbal Stroop Task: A Lifespan Approach to Interference and Sequential Congruency Effect

“…Another ERP study on different tasks (stimulus-response compatibility, Simon task and a hybrid choice-reaction/No-Go task) found differences in the magnitude of the Gratton effect between children and young adults (Smulders et al, 2018), which disappeared after correction of processing speed differences among the age-groups. Results on aging (Puccioni and Vallesi, 2012; Aisenberg et al, 2014; Aschenbrenner and Balota, 2015; Xiang et al, 2016), suggest that the Gratton effect is preserved. This paradigm helped clarify two main hypotheses regarding decrease in cognitive performances with aging (Puccioni and Vallesi, 2012).…”

“…Regarding the SCE evolution across the lifespan, we are not aware of any study investigating how age impacts this effect all along the lifespan spectrum. There are, however, investigations on the transition from childhood to adulthood (Waxer and Morton, 2011; Kray et al, 2012; Larson et al, 2012; Ambrosi et al, 2016; Smulders et al, 2018) and on the transition from young to older adults (Puccioni and Vallesi, 2012; Aisenberg et al, 2014; Aschenbrenner and Balota, 2015; Xiang et al, 2016). These studies suggest that children show stronger interference effects and higher error rates relative to young adults, but when combining studies from the entire lifespan spectrum, the SCE seems globally stable across development, nonetheless showing stronger magnitudes at the extremities of the lifespan continuum.…”