Leiva Alicia, Parmentier Fabrice B R, Andrés Pilar
Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), Neuropsychology and Cognition Group, Ed. Guillem Cifre de Colonya, University of the Balearic Islands, Ctra de Valldemossa, km 7,5, 07122, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain,
Psychol Res. 2015 May;79(3):401-10. doi: 10.1007/s00426-014-0573-5. Epub 2014 May 23.
Aging is typically considered to bring a reduction of the ability to resist distraction by task-irrelevant stimuli. Yet recent work suggests that this conclusion must be qualified and that the effect of aging is mitigated by whether irrelevant and target stimuli emanate from the same modalities or from distinct ones. Some studies suggest that aging is especially sensitive to distraction within-modality while others suggest it is greater across modalities. Here we report the first study to measure the effect of aging on deviance distraction in cross-modal (auditory-visual) and uni-modal (auditory-auditory) oddball tasks. Young and older adults were asked to judge the parity of target digits (auditory or visual in distinct blocks of trials), each preceded by a task-irrelevant sound (the same tone on most trials-the standard sound-or, on rare and unpredictable trials, a burst of white noise-the deviant sound). Deviant sounds yielded distraction (longer response times relative to standard sounds) in both tasks and age groups. However, an age-related increase in distraction was observed in the cross-modal task and not in the uni-modal task. We argue that aging might affect processes involved in the switching of attention across modalities and speculate that this may due to the slowing of this type of attentional shift or a reduction in cognitive control required to re-orient attention toward the target's modality.
衰老通常被认为会导致抵抗与任务无关刺激干扰的能力下降。然而，最近的研究表明，这一结论必须加以限定，衰老的影响会因无关刺激和目标刺激是来自相同模态还是不同模态而减轻。一些研究表明，衰老对模态内的干扰特别敏感，而另一些研究则表明跨模态的干扰更大。在此，我们报告了第一项测量衰老对跨模态（听觉-视觉）和单模态（听觉-听觉）奇偶数任务中偏差干扰影响的研究。我们要求年轻和年长的成年人判断目标数字的奇偶性（在不同的试验块中为听觉或视觉），每个目标数字之前都有一个与任务无关的声音（在大多数试验中为相同的音调——标准声音——或者，在罕见且不可预测的试验中，一阵白噪声——偏差声音）。在这两个任务和年龄组中，偏差声音都会产生干扰（相对于标准声音，反应时间更长）。然而，在跨模态任务中观察到了与年龄相关的干扰增加，而在单模态任务中则没有。我们认为，衰老可能会影响跨模态注意力切换所涉及的过程，并推测这可能是由于这种类型的注意力转移减慢，或者是重新将注意力转向目标模态所需的认知控制减少所致。
