Festa-Martino Elena, Ott Brian R, Heindel William C
Department of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Neuropsychology. 2004 Apr;18(2):258-68. doi: 10.1037/0894-4105.18.2.258.
The effects of aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) on phasic alerting and exogenous spatial orienting were examined within a single precuing task. Phasic alerting decreased with normal aging and was completely eliminated with AD. AD patients also demonstrated an increased spatial orienting effect, attributable to an increased benefit from spatial orienting that was associated with a decreased benefit from nonselective alerting. These results suggest that performance within the precuing paradigm reflects the product of an interaction between nonselective alerting processes and spatially selective orienting processes. The results also highlight the importance of simultaneously assessing alerting and orienting within the same task, because changes attributable to alerting may otherwise be attributed incorrectly to changes in 1 or more processes associated with spatial orienting.
在一项单一的预提示任务中，研究了衰老和阿尔茨海默病（AD）对阶段性警觉和外源性空间定向的影响。随着正常衰老，阶段性警觉降低，而在AD患者中则完全消失。AD患者还表现出空间定向效应增加，这归因于空间定向带来了更多益处，同时非选择性警觉带来的益处减少。这些结果表明，预提示范式下的表现反映了非选择性警觉过程和空间选择性定向过程之间相互作用的结果。研究结果还强调了在同一任务中同时评估警觉和定向的重要性，因为否则归因于警觉的变化可能会被错误地归因于与空间定向相关的一个或多个过程的变化。
