Visual search and the aging brain: Discerning the effects of age-related brain volume shrinkage on alertness, feature binding, and attentional control.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE Decline in visuospatial abilities with advancing age has been attributed to a demise of bottom-up and top-down functions involving sensory processing, selective attention, and executive control. These functions may be differentially affected by age-related volume shrinkage of subcortical and cortical nodes subserving the dorsal and ventral processing streams and the corpus callosum mediating interhemispheric information exchange. METHOD 55 healthy adults (25–84 years) underwent structural MRI and performed a visual search task to test perceptual and attentional demands by combining feature-conjunction searches with ‘gestalt’ grouping and attentional cueing paradigms. RESULTS Poorer conjunction, but not feature, search performance was related to older age and volume shrinkage of nodes in the dorsolateral processing stream. When displays allowed perceptual grouping through distractor homogeneity, poorer conjunction-search performance correlated with smaller ventrolateral prefrontal cortical and callosal volumes. An alerting cue attenuated age effects on conjunction search, and the alertness benefit was associated with thalamic, callosal, and temporal cortex volumes. CONCLUSION Our results indicate that older adults can capitalize on early parallel stages of visual information processing, whereas age-related limitations arise at later serial processing stages requiring self-guided selective attention and executive control. These limitations are explained in part by age-related brain volume shrinkage and can be mitigated by external cues.

Normatization of the Symbol Digit Modalities Test-Oral Version in a Latin American Country

“…One of the reasons for this is that brain aging negatively affects attention tests that have to do with selective attention, processing speed, and executive control (Borghesani et al, 2013;Kerchner et al, 2012;Mü ller-Oehring, Schulte, Rohlfing, Pfefferbaum, & Sullivan, 2013). There are other factors that may influence the relationship between age and cognition: age-related changes in personality, such as anxiety and apathy (Beaudreau & O'Hara, 2009;Brodaty, Altendorf, Withall, & Sachdev, 2010), and presence of morbidity associated with cognitive deterioration, such as hypertension (Scuteri et al, 2011).…”

Micro and regular saccades across the lifespan during a visual search of “Where’s Waldo” puzzles

“…In this and other conjunction search tasks, response time scales with the number of distractors and it is generally thought to be a serial process. In all studies of childhood development, both conjunctive and feature search performance improves (shorter reaction times) with age into early adulthood (Lobaugh, Cole, & Rovet, 1998; Merrill & Conners, 2013; Ruskin & Kaye, 1990; Thompson & Massaro, 1989), while studies with older subjects show declines with age (Amenedo, Lorenzo-Lopez, & Pazo-Alvarez, 2012; Bennett, Motes, Rao, & Rypma, 2012; Burton-Danner, Owsley, & Jackson, 2001; Cosman, Lees, Lee, Rizzo, & Vecera, 2012; Foster, Behrmann, & Stuss, 1995; Muller-Oehring, Schulte, Rohlfing, Pfefferbaum, & Sullivan, 2013; Potter, Grealy, Elliott, & Andres, 2012). Taken together, these studies suggest that performance on search tasks exhibits a U-shaped function over the lifespan.…”

Brain pathways to recovery from alcohol dependence

“…Quantitative neuroimaging and neuropsychological approaches permit tracking alcoholism’s dynamic course through periods of sobriety and relapse and reveal evidence for neuroplasticity and neuroadaptation of brain structure and functions (e.g., Sullivan et al, 2013). In humans, long-term, excessive alcohol consumption results in a variety of somatic and central nervous system insults that must be parsed from the consequences of normal aging on the brain (e.g., Muller-Oehring et al, 2013). Consistent with other neuroimaging results (e.g., Holt et al, 2012; Spudich and Ances, 2012), our work provides evidence that the study of disease progression in the context of normal aging requires longitudinal study of relevant variables (Kroenke et al, 2014; Pfefferbaum et al, 2014).…”