Rienäcker Franziska, Jacobs Heidi I L, Van Heugten Caroline M, Van Gerven Pascal W M
Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
School of Mental Health and Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands; Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2018 Nov;191:101-111. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.09.005. Epub 2018 Sep 18.
Selective attention has been found to decline with aging, possibly depending on the sensory modality through which targets and distractors are presented. We investigated the capacity of older adults to improve performance on visual and auditory selective attention tasks. 31 younger (mean age = 22.8 years, SD = 2.1) and 29 older participants (mean age = 69.5 years, SD = 5.8) performed visual and auditory tasks with and without unimodal and cross-modal distraction across five practice sessions. Reaction time decreased with practice in both age groups. Strikingly, this performance improvement was similar across the age groups. Moreover, distractor modality did not affect performance gains in either age group. Older adults were disproportionally affected by cross-modal visual distraction, however, corroborating previous studies. This age-related effect was mitigated during the practice sessions. Finally, there was no transfer of practice to neuropsychological test performance. These results suggest a high capacity of older individuals to improve selective attention functions within and across sensory modalities.
研究发现，选择性注意力会随着年龄增长而下降，这可能取决于呈现目标和干扰物的感觉通道。我们研究了老年人在视觉和听觉选择性注意力任务中提高表现的能力。31名年轻参与者（平均年龄 = 22.8岁，标准差 = 2.1）和29名年长参与者（平均年龄 = 69.5岁，标准差 = 5.8）在五个练习阶段中，分别在有无单峰和跨模态干扰的情况下进行视觉和听觉任务。两个年龄组的反应时间都随着练习而减少。引人注目的是，两个年龄组的表现提升情况相似。此外，干扰物通道对两个年龄组的表现提升均无影响。然而，与之前的研究一致，年长成年人受到跨模态视觉干扰的影响更大。在练习阶段，这种与年龄相关的影响得到了缓解。最后，练习并没有迁移到神经心理学测试表现上。这些结果表明，老年人在感觉通道内和跨感觉通道提高选择性注意力功能的能力很强。
