Department of Psychology, College of Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
Center for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Robotics, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Oct 28;21(21):7142. doi: 10.3390/s21217142.
Sustained attention is essential for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, and the deficiency of this function is often associated with health-related risks such as falling and frailty. The present study examined whether the well-established age-effect on reducing mind-wandering, the drift to internal thoughts that are seen to be detrimental to attentional control, could be replicated by using a robotic experimenter for older adults who are not as familiar with online technologies. A total of 28 younger and 22 older adults performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) by answering thought probes regarding their attention states and providing confidence ratings for their own task performances. The indices from the modified SART suggested a well-documented conservative response strategy endorsed by older adults, which were represented by slower responses and increased omission errors. Moreover, the slower responses and increased omissions were found to be associated with less self-reported mind-wandering, thus showing consistency with their higher subjective ratings of attentional control. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of constructing age-related cognitive profiles with attention evaluation instruction based on a social companion robot for older adults at home.
持续注意力对于老年人保持积极的生活方式至关重要，而这种功能的缺陷常常与健康相关的风险有关，如跌倒和虚弱。本研究通过使用对不熟悉在线技术的老年人来说更友好的机器人实验者，来检验对内部思维的漂移（被认为对注意力控制有害的思维漂移）的减少是否可以复制已建立的年龄效应。共有 28 名年轻参与者和 22 名老年参与者通过回答关于他们的注意力状态的思维探测问题并对自己的任务表现提供信心评级来完成持续注意力反应任务 (SART)。修改后的 SART 的指标表明，老年参与者支持一种记录良好的保守反应策略，这表现为反应速度较慢和遗漏错误增加。此外，发现较慢的反应和更多的遗漏与较少的自我报告的思维漂移有关，因此与他们对注意力控制的更高主观评价一致。总的来说，这项研究表明，对于在家中的老年人，使用基于社交陪伴机器人的注意力评估指令构建与年龄相关的认知档案具有潜力。
