Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.
Department of Psychology.
Psychol Aging. 2020 Aug;35(5):780-791. doi: 10.1037/pag0000426.
Aging affects brain circuitry involved in both inhibition and arousal. In this study, we tested whether older adults are more or less prone to distraction from emotionally arousing events than young adults. To do so, we examined how arousing taboo distractor words affected concurrent 1-back task performance and subsequent memory for distractors. Our second goal was to examine how the arousal level of 1 item can modulate processing of preceding neutral distractors (taboo-minus-1 distractors). During the task, participants first made 1-back judgments about target pictures that were superimposed with to-be-ignored neutral or taboo distractors. Relative to young adults, older adults were more distracted by taboo than neutral words on the 1-back task and remembered more of the taboo distractors on a later incidental recognition task. Furthermore, young adults showed better suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors than neutral distractors, whereas in older adults, arousal did not facilitate suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. This effect appeared to require attentional control as adding an unrelated attentional load during the 1-back task eliminated the beneficial effect of arousal for young adults' suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. Finally, when top-down attentional guidance was provided by increasing the goal relevance of target pictures, both groups showed enhanced suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors versus other neutral distractors. Together, these findings imply that the effect of arousal on distractibility in aging may arise from an interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
衰老会影响大脑中涉及抑制和唤醒的神经回路。在这项研究中，我们测试了老年人是否比年轻人更容易受到情绪唤醒事件的干扰。为此，我们研究了令人兴奋的禁忌分心词如何影响同时进行的 1 -back 任务表现和随后对分心词的记忆。我们的第二个目标是检验 1 项物品的兴奋程度如何调节对先前中性分心词（禁忌-1 分心词）的加工。在任务中，参与者首先对目标图片进行 1-back 判断，这些图片叠加了要忽略的中性或禁忌分心词。与年轻人相比，老年人在 1-back 任务中对禁忌词的分心程度更高，在随后的偶然识别任务中对禁忌分心词的记忆也更多。此外，年轻人对禁忌-1 分心词的抑制作用优于中性分心词，而在老年人中，兴奋并没有促进对禁忌-1 分心词的抑制。这种效应似乎需要注意力控制，因为在 1-back 任务中增加不相关的注意力负荷会消除兴奋对年轻人抑制禁忌-1 分心词的有益影响。最后，当通过增加目标图片的目标相关性来提供自上而下的注意力引导时，两组都表现出对禁忌-1 分心词的抑制作用增强，而不是对其他中性分心词的抑制作用增强。总之，这些发现意味着，兴奋对衰老中分心的影响可能是自上而下和自下而上的过程相互作用的结果。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
