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On the preservation of vigilant attention to semantic information in healthy aging

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Abstract

Despite decades of research on younger adults, little is known about the way in which vigilant attention is affected by healthy aging, and the small body of work that does exist has yielded mixed findings. Prior examinations of aging and vigilant attention have focused almost exclusively on sensory/perceptual tasks despite the fact that many real-world vigilance tasks are semantic in nature and it has been shown that older adults exhibit memory and attention deficits in semantic tasks in other domains. Here, we present the first empirical investigation of vigilant attention to verbal stimuli in healthy normal aging. In Experiment 1 we find that older adults are just as able as younger adults to identify critical targets defined by category membership (both overall and over time). In Experiment 2, we increase the difficulty of the task by changing the target category from one block to the next, but again find no age-group effects in accuracy. Response time data, however, show that older adults respond more slowly and subjective ratings indicate that older adults experience higher workload and arousal compared to their younger counterparts. The practical as well as theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Due to participant recruitment limitations, it should be noted that females are over-represented in our sample. Some work has pointed to potential sex differences in sustained attention and language abilities however (Dittmar et al. 1993; Shaywitz et al. 1995 respectively). Excluding the males from our sample, while reducing experimental power, does not alter the findings in any qualitative manner between age groups.

  2. While mean MEQ scores for both Younger and Older groups fell within the ‘neutral’ range (mean scores of 46.8 and 58.1 respectively), the Older group was significantly more ‘morning type’ than the Younger group, t (64) = 4.76, p < 0.001, d = 1.19. We do not consider the MEQ data any further.

  3. A between-experiment analysis of Lure false alarm rates reveals a shallower decline in Lure false alarm rates in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1 (F (5, 595) = 4.96, p < 0.001), however, this is simply driven by the fact that Lure false alarm rates in the first block of Experiment 2 are lower than in Experiment 1 (likely due to a more cautious approach to the task).

  4. While the length of the distracter items do differ from that of both the target and lure items (p’s < 0.001), target and lure items do not differ in word length however (p = 0.70) and so deciding whether an item is a target or lure in the present experiments could not have been approached using a perceptual discrimination strategy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3GS, Canada

    David R. Thomson & Lynn Hasher

  2. Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Canada

    Lynn Hasher

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  1. David R. Thomson
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  2. Lynn Hasher
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Correspondence to David R. Thomson.

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Thomson, D.R., Hasher, L. On the preservation of vigilant attention to semantic information in healthy aging. Exp Brain Res 235, 2287–2300 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-017-4969-5

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