Thomson David R, Hasher Lynn
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3GS, Canada.
Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Canada.
Exp Brain Res. 2017 Jul;235(7):2287-2300. doi: 10.1007/s00221-017-4969-5. Epub 2017 May 5.
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.
尽管对年轻人进行了数十年的研究，但对于健康衰老如何影响警觉性注意，人们知之甚少，而且现有的少量研究成果也不一致。此前关于衰老与警觉性注意的研究几乎完全集中在感觉/知觉任务上，尽管事实上许多现实世界中的警觉任务本质上是语义性的，并且已有研究表明老年人在其他领域的语义任务中表现出记忆和注意缺陷。在此，我们首次对健康正常衰老过程中对言语刺激的警觉性注意进行实证研究。在实验1中，我们发现老年人与年轻人一样，能够识别由类别成员定义的关键目标（总体上以及随着时间推移）。在实验2中，我们通过在不同组块间改变目标类别来增加任务难度，但同样在准确性方面未发现年龄组效应。然而，反应时间数据表明老年人反应更慢，主观评分显示与年轻同龄人相比，老年人经历的工作负荷和唤醒水平更高。我们讨论了这些发现的实际意义和理论意义。
