de Bruin Angela, Sala Sergio Della
1 Human Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia, Spain.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 May;71(5):1219-1233. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2017.1311352. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
Older adults have been argued to have impoverished inhibitory control compared to younger adults. However, these effects of age may depend on processing speed and their manifestation may furthermore depend on the type of inhibitory control task that is used. We present two experiments that examine age effects on inhibition across three tasks: a Simon arrow, static flanker and motion flanker task. The results showed overall slower reaction times (RTs) for older adults on all three tasks. However, effects of age on inhibition costs were only found for the Simon task, but not for the two flanker tasks. The motion flanker task furthermore showed an effect of baseline processing speed on the relation between age and inhibition costs. Older adults with slower baseline responses showed smaller inhibition costs, suggesting they were affected less by the flanker items than faster older adults. These findings suggest that effects of age on inhibition are task dependent and can be modulated by task-specific features such as the type of interference, type of stimuli and processing speed.
与年轻人相比，老年人的抑制控制能力被认为有所下降。然而，年龄的这些影响可能取决于加工速度，其表现可能还取决于所使用的抑制控制任务的类型。我们进行了两项实验，考察了年龄对三项任务抑制能力的影响：西蒙箭头任务、静态侧抑制任务和动态侧抑制任务。结果显示，老年人在所有三项任务中的反应时总体较慢。然而，年龄对抑制成本的影响仅在西蒙任务中发现，而在两项侧抑制任务中未发现。动态侧抑制任务还显示了基线加工速度对年龄与抑制成本关系的影响。基线反应较慢的老年人抑制成本较小，这表明他们受侧抑制项目的影响比反应较快的老年人小。这些发现表明，年龄对抑制的影响取决于任务，并且可以由任务特定的特征（如干扰类型、刺激类型和加工速度）调节。
