The effects of attention on age-related relational memory deficits: Evidence from a novel attentional manipulation.

Healthy aging is often accompanied by episodic memory decline. Prior studies have consistently demonstrated that older adults show disproportionate deficits in relational memory (RM) relative to item memory (IM). Despite rich evidence of an age-related RM deficit, the source of this deficit remains unspecified. One of the most widely investigated factors of age-related RM impairment is a reduction in attentional resources. However, no prior studies have demonstrated that reduced attentional resources are the critical source of age-related RM deficits. Here, we used qualitatively different attention tasks and tested whether reduced attention for relational processing underlies the RM deficit observed in aging. In Experiment 1, we imposed either item-detection or relation-detection attention tasks on young adults during episodic memory encoding and found that only the concurrent attention task that involves relational processing disproportionately impaired RM performance in young adults. Moreover, by ruling out the possible confound of task difficulty on the disproportionate RM impairment, we further demonstrated that reduced relational attention is a key factor for the age-related RM deficit. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results from Experiment 1 by using different materials of stimuli and found that the effect of relational attention on RM is material general. The results of Experiment 2 also showed that reducing attentional resources for relational processing in young adults strikingly equated their RM performance to that of older adults. Thus, this study documents the first evidence that reduced attentional resources for relational processing are a critical factor for the relational memory impairment observed in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spatial attention and response control in healthy younger and older adults and individuals with Alzheimer's disease: Evidence for disproportionate selection impairments in the simon task.

The authors examined the degree to which aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) influence the ability to control attention when conflict is presented in terms of incongruent mapping between a stimulus and the appropriate response. In a variant of the Simon task, healthy older adults and older adults with mild or very mild AD showed disproportionately larger reaction time (RT) costs when the stimulus and response were in conflict relative to RT costs of healthy younger adults. Analyses of RT distributions provide support for a 2-process model of the Simon effect in which there is a short-lived transient effect of the irrelevant dimension in younger adults and a more sustained influence across the RT distribution in older adults. An analysis of error rates showed that the older adults with mild and very mild AD made more errors on incongruent trials, suggesting that AD leads to increased likelihood of selecting the prepotent pathway. The findings are discussed in terms of the special nature of the response requirements of the Simon task to better illuminate the attentional decrements in both healthy aging and early stage AD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Illusory recollection in older adults and younger adults under divided attention.

The authors investigated the effect of divided attention, study-list repetition, and age on recollection and familiarity. Older and younger adults under full attention and younger adults under divided attention at study viewed word lists highly associated with a single unstudied word (critical lure) once or three times, and subsequently performed a remember-know recognition test. Younger adults made fewer false remember responses to critical lures from repeated study lists, whereas younger adults under divided attention and older adults both showed an increase with repetition. Findings suggest older adults' susceptibility to illusory memories is related to a deficit in available attention during encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The response-signal method reveals age-related changes in object working memory.

Sixteen healthy young adults (ages 18-32) and 16 healthy older adults (ages 67-81) completed a delayed response task in which they saw the following visual sequence: memory stimuli (2 abstract shapes; 3,000 ms), a blank delay (5,000 ms), a probe stimulus of variable duration (one abstract shape; 125, 250, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 ms), and a mask (500 ms). Subjects decided whether the probe stimulus matched either of the memory stimuli; they were instructed to respond during the mask, placing greater emphasis on speed than accuracy. The authors used D. L. Hintzman & T. Curran's (1994) 3-parameter compound bounded exponential model of speed-accuracy tradeoff to describe changes in discriminability associated with total processing time. Group-level analysis revealed a higher rate parameter and a higher asymptote parameter for the young adult group, but no difference across groups in x-intercept. Proxy measures of cognitive reserve (Y. Stern et al., 2005) predicted the rate parameter value, particularly in older adults. Results suggest that in working memory, aging impairs both the maximum capacity for discriminability and the rate of information accumulation, but not the temporal threshold for discriminability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective attention to emotion in the aging brain.

A growing body of research suggests that the ability to regulate emotion remains stable or improves across the adult life span. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that this pattern of findings reflects the prioritization of emotional goals. Given that goal-directed behavior requires attentional control, the present study was designed to investigate age differences in selective attention to emotional lexical stimuli under conditions of emotional interference. Both neural and behavioral measures were obtained during an experiment in which participants completed a flanker task that required them to make categorical judgments about emotional and nonemotional stimuli. Older adults showed interference in both the behavioral and neural measures on control trials but not on emotion trials. Although older adults typically show relatively high levels of interference and reduced cognitive control during nonemotional tasks, they appear to be able to successfully reduce interference during emotional tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging in rhesus macaques is associated with changes in novelty preference and altered saccade dynamics.

Studies demonstrating recognition deficits with aging often use tasks in which subjects have an incentive to correctly encode or retrieve the experimental stimuli. In contrast to these tasks, which may engage strategic encoding and retrieval processes, the visual paired comparison (VPC) task measures spontaneous eye movements made toward a novel as compared with familiar stimulus. In the present study, seven rhesus macaques aged 6 to 30 years exhibited a dramatic age-dependent decline in preference for a novel image compared with one presented seconds earlier. The age effect could not be accounted for by memory deficits alone, because it was present even when familiarization preceded test by 1 second. It also could not be explained by an encoding deficit, because the effect persisted with increased familiarity of the sample stimulus. Reduced novelty preference did correlate with eye movement variables, including reaction time distributions and saccade frequency. At long delay intervals (24 or 48 hours) aging was paradoxically associated with increased novelty preference. Several explanations for the age effect are considered, including the possible role of dopamine. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is there an age-related positivity effect in visual attention? A comparison of two methodologies.

Research suggests a positivity effect in older adults' memory for emotional material, but the evidence from the attentional domain is mixed. The present study combined 2 methodologies for studying preferences in visual attention, eye tracking, and dot-probe, as younger and older adults viewed synthetic emotional faces. Eye tracking most consistently revealed a positivity effect in older adults' attention, so that older adults showed preferential looking toward happy faces and away from sad faces. Dot-probe results were less robust, but in the same direction. Methodological and theoretical implications for the study of socioemotional aging are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of visual attention in predicting driving impairment in older adults.

This study evaluated the role of visual attention (as measured by the DriverScan change detection task and the Useful Field of View Test [UFOV]) in the prediction of driving impairment in 155 adults between the ages of 63 and 87. In contrast to previous research, participants were not oversampled for visual impairment or history of automobile accidents. Although a history of automobile accidents within the past 3 years could not be predicted using any variable, driving performance in a low-fidelity simulator could be significantly predicted by performance in the change detection task and by the divided and selection attention subtests of the UFOV in structural equation models. The sensitivity and specificity of each measure in identifying at-risk drivers were also evaluated with receiver operating characteristic curves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual and cognitive load interact to control the spatial focus of attention.

Caparos and Linnell (2009, 2010) used a variable-separation flanker paradigm to show that (a) when cognitive load is low, increasing perceptual load causes spatial attention to focus and (b) when perceptual load is high, decreasing cognitive load causes spatial attention to focus. Here, we tested whether the effects of perceptual and cognitive load on spatial focus remain when, respectively, cognitive load is high and perceptual load is low. We found that decreasing cognitive load only causes spatial attention to focus when perceptual load is high and the stimulus encourages this. Moreover, and contrary to the widely held assumption that perceptual load focuses attention automatically (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004), perceptual load exerts its focusing effect only with the engagement of cognitive resources when cognitive load is low. In sum, perceptual and cognitive mechanisms exert interacting effects and operate in concert to focus spatial attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Object-Based Attention and Cognitive Tunneling.

Simulator-based research has shown that pilots cognitively tunnel their attention on head-up displays (HUDs). Cognitive tunneling has been linked to object-based visual attention on the assumption that HUD symbology is perceptually grouped into an object that is perceived and attended separately from the external scene. The present research strengthens the link between cognitive tunneling and object-based attention by showing that (a) elements of a visual display that share a common fate are grouped into a perceptual object and that this grouping is sufficient to sustain object-based attention, (b) object-based attention and thereby cognitive tunneling is affected by strategic focusing of attention, and (c) object-based attention is primarily inhibitory in nature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive resources, valence, and memory retrieval of emotional events in older adults.

In 2 studies with older adults, the authors investigated the effect of executive attention resources on the retrieval of emotional public events. Participants completed a battery of working memory tasks, as a measure of executive attention, and a battery of tasks assessing memory, as well as subjective experiences associated with the retrieval of remote public events. Participants also rated the valence of each public event story. The group-rated valence of the public event stories predicted retrieval and the quality of experiences associated with them, such that emotionally arousing events elicited the highest memory rates and the richest experiences. Furthermore, positive public events elicited the highest memory rates. Executive attention moderated only the relationship between event valence and how participants' associated memories are experienced at retrieval, such that superior executive attention resources predicted richer experiences associated with positive relative to neutral and negative stories. The current results extend previous findings on the effects of aging on emotion regulation, suggesting that cognitive control resources modulate subjective experiences associated with retrieved memories for remote real life events, but not memory retrieval itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and goal-directed emotional attention: Distraction reverses emotional biases.

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults' selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults' information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults' tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults' limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive Operations in the Generation Effect on a Recall Test: Role of Aging and Divided Attention.

Generation effect (generated words are better memorized than read words) of anagrams, rhymes, and associates of target words was examined in young, elderly, and very old subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that only young subjects benefit from the generation effect in a free-recall test when the rule is of a phonological nature. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 showed that the generation effect of rhymes was due to a resources-dependent self-initiated process. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that in a divided-attention situation, generation effect of rhymes is not significant in young subjects, but that the generation effect of semantic associates remains significant for both groups (Experiment 5). The results are discussed within the environmental support framework and the transfer-appropriate processing framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Apolipoprotein E and Cognitive Performance: A Meta-Analysis.

The ε4 allele of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and may also affect cognitive performance in normal aging. Evidence of the presence and magnitude of ε4-related cognitive deficits was examined with a meta-analysis of the available literature. Thirty-eight studies were included, and cognitive performance was collapsed into 8 domains. Results indicated significant APOE-ε4 group differences for global cognitive functioning, episodic memory, and executive functioning, in favor of non-ε4 carriers. In addition, older age and APOE-ε4 heterozygosity was associated with smaller ε4-related impairments. The meta-analysis results suggest that APOE-ε4 genotype does affect cognitive performance in healthy aging, although the influence is relatively small and specific to certain domains of cognitive performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Chronological age and age-related cognitive deficits are associated with an increase in multiple types of driving errors in late life.

Objective: Older driver research has mostly focused on identifying that small proportion of older drivers who are unsafe. Little is known about how normal cognitive changes in aging affect driving in the wider population of adults who drive regularly. We evaluated the association of cognitive function and age with driving errors. Method: A sample of 266 drivers aged 70 to 88 years were assessed on abilities that decline in normal aging (visual attention, processing speed, inhibition, reaction time, task switching) and the UFOV?, which is a validated screening instrument for older drivers. Participants completed an on-road driving test. Generalized linear models were used to estimate the associations of cognitive factors with specific driving errors and number of errors in self-directed and instructor navigated conditions. Results: All error types increased with chronological age. Reaction time was not associated with driving errors in multivariate analyses. A cognitive factor measuring speeded selective attention and switching was uniquely associated with the most errors types. The UFOV? predicted blind-spot errors and errors on dual carriageways. After adjusting for age, education, and gender, the cognitive factors explained 7% of variance in the total number of errors in the instructor-navigated condition and 4% of variance in the self-navigated condition. Conclusion: We conclude that among older drivers, errors increase with age and are associated with speeded selective attention, particularly when that requires attending to the stimuli in the periphery of the visual field, task switching, errors inhibiting responses, and visual discrimination. These abilities should be the target of cognitive training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning and attention: Brain and behavioural approaches the 1995 Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science.

The Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science (BASICS) was founded in 1982, and thus the meeting this past May marks the 14th anniversary of this conference. Many recent talks have stressed the importance of studying these processes in conjunction with each other. In keeping with this theme, the focus of BASICS 1995 was on recent neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and behavioural findings with respect to attention and learning. Further, many of the talks provided evidence in support of attentional organization centered around objects, rather than locations. The first talk, from world-renowned scientist Michael Posner, centered on his work involving neuroscientific approaches to the study of high-level skills such as reading. Steven Luck's talk also emphasized the use of multiple neurophysiological techniques to study high-level cognitive function, in this case, the binding of features. The talk by Lynn Robertson about her work in collaboration with Anne Treisman, switched to a focus on neuropsychological, rather than neurophysiological, findings regarding attention in humans. The last speaker of the first afternoon, Patrick Cavanagh, gave a talk replete with impressive visual demonstrations regarding his work in the behavioural analysis of spatial visual attention. The first speaker of the following morning session, Jeremy Wolfe, began his presentation by comparing his theory of visual search, which he calls Guided Search, to the more traditional theory of search, Feature Integration Theory (FIT), as proposed by Anne Treisman. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Disengaging attention: On the locus of the cue-duration effect in partial report.

Increasing cue duration impairs performance in bar-probe partial report when cues are presented peripherally, but not centrally (P. Dixon, R. Gordon, A. Leung, & V. Di Lollo, 1997). Three experiments examined whether this cue-duration effect reflects processes of exogenous attention. The effect of cue duration on partial report performance with peripheral, but not central, cues was replicated (Experiment 1). Further experiments manipulated the degree that exogenous versus endogenous modes of selection were favored and found that the cue-duration effect for peripheral cues was reduced (1) when blocks contained a high proportion of central cues (Experiment 2) and (2) when the color of the cue indicated the location of the target (Experiment 3). These findings challenge the view that the cue-duration effect is restricted to exogenous attention and are discussed in terms of the process of disengaging attention from the cue to reallocate attention to the target representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional control in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Objective: Attentional control, the ability to maintain goal-directedness in the face of distraction, has been shown to decline in normal aging (NA) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), yet the nature and extent of deficits is under debate. This study investigated attentional control in NA and AD compared to healthy young adults in several tasks such as setting, suppressing, switching, and preparing attention. Method: Fifty-two participants (17 AD, 17 NA, and 18 young participants) underwent the Tower of London, the Zoo map test, the Stroop test, letter verbal fluency, a computerized version of the Rule shift cards tests, the Trail making test, the Plus-minus test, and a reaction time task with variable preparatory intervals. Results: Analyses of variance showed that NA as compared to young participants were impaired in the Tower of London, the Stroop test, and the Rule shift cards tests. AD as compared to NA participants were impaired in all tests except the Stroop test. Principal component analysis in young adults confirmed the modularity of attentional tasks, which was reduced in NA and AD participants. Principal component analysis in all populations showed a decline of attentional control with NA and AD regardless of the tasks, with an increase in between-participants variability only between young and NA participants. Conclusions: Attentional control dysfunction is different in NA and AD: NA affects suppressing attention, switching attention for unpredictable but not predictable events, and preparing attention for unpredictable events, whereas AD affects setting, suppressing, switching, and preparing attention with less specificity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of age and task demands on visual selective attention.

We investigated whether young and older adults differ on measures of interference (INT), negative priming (NP), and inhibition of return (IOR) on a spatial selective attention task that gradually increased in cognitive demand, from simple perceptual matching to letter identification. For both groups, INT increased and IOR decreased with task demand; while NP remained stable. We found age-related increases in INT, NP, and IOR, independent of task demand. However, only between-groups differences in IOR remained after correcting for age-related slowing in response times. Finally, we found no association between our measures of attention across groups, suggesting negligible overlap between INT, NP, and IOR. Our results indicate that attention is selectively and independently influenced by age and task demands, with both effects dependent on how attention is measured. These findings shed light on the “frontal hypothesis of aging.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The accuracy of self-monitoring and its relationship to self-focused attention in dysphoria and clinical depression.

The accuracy with which dysphoric (Study 1) and clinically depressed (Study 2) individuals make self-regulatory judgments about their own performance in the absence of external feedback and the extent to which this relates to trait self-focused attention (SFA) were examined. Relative to objective criteria, both dysphoric and depressed participants showed a positive judgment bias, overestimating the number of trials they had performed correctly. Relative to control participants, the dysphoric and depressed groups showed a reduction in the extent of this positive bias in that they judged error trials more accurately and correct trials less accurately. Although the dysphoric and depressed groups both reported elevated trait SFA, this did not correlate significantly with accuracy of self-judgment on the performance-monitoring task. Implications for self-regulation models of depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)