Neuroimaging Laboratory, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy.
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
Cognition. 2021 May;210:104617. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104617. Epub 2021 Feb 6.
The ability to resist distracting stimuli whilst voluntarily focusing on a task is fundamental to our everyday cognitive functioning. Here, we investigated how this ability develops, and thereafter declines, across the lifespan using a single task/experiment. Young children (5-7 years), older children (10-11 years), young adults (20-27 years), and older adults (62-86 years) were presented with complex visual scenes. Endogenous (voluntary) attention was engaged by having the participants search for a visual target presented on either the left or right side of the display. The onset of the visual scenes was preceded - at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 50, 200, or 500 ms - by a task-irrelevant sound (an exogenous crossmodal spatial distractor) delivered either on the same or opposite side as the visual target, or simultaneously on both sides (cued, uncued, or neutral trials, respectively). Age-related differences were revealed, especially in the extreme age-groups, which showed a greater impact of crossmodal spatial distractors. Young children were highly susceptible to exogenous spatial distraction at the shortest SOA (50 ms), whereas older adults were distracted at all SOAs, showing significant exogenous capture effects during the visual search task. By contrast, older children and young adults' search performance was not significantly affected by crossmodal spatial distraction. Overall, these findings present a detailed picture of the developmental trajectory of endogenous resistance to crossmodal spatial distraction from childhood to old age and demonstrate a different efficiency in coping with distraction across the four age-groups studied.
在自愿专注于任务的同时抵抗分散注意力刺激的能力是我们日常认知功能的基础。在这里，我们使用单一任务/实验研究了这种能力如何在整个生命周期中发展，然后又如何下降。年幼的孩子（5-7 岁）、年长的孩子（10-11 岁）、年轻的成年人（20-27 岁）和年长的成年人（62-86 岁）被呈现出复杂的视觉场景。通过让参与者在显示器的左侧或右侧搜索视觉目标，内源性（自愿）注意力被参与进来。视觉场景的开始先于（在刺激呈现时间间隔（SOA）为 50、200 或 500 毫秒时）呈现一个与视觉目标在同一侧或相对侧呈现的任务不相关的声音（外源性跨模态空间分心物），或者同时在两侧呈现（分别为提示、未提示或中性试验）。揭示了与年龄相关的差异，尤其是在极端年龄组中，这些年龄组对外源性空间分心物的影响更大。年幼的孩子在最短的 SOA（50 毫秒）时非常容易受到外源性空间分心物的影响，而年长的成年人在所有 SOA 时都受到分心物的影响，在视觉搜索任务中表现出明显的外源性捕获效应。相比之下，年长的孩子和年轻的成年人的搜索表现不受跨模态空间分心物的显著影响。总的来说，这些发现呈现了一个从儿童到老年的内源性抵抗跨模态空间分心的发展轨迹的详细图片，并展示了四个年龄组在应对分心方面的不同效率。
