Nicholls Victoria I, Wiener Jan M, Meso Andrew Isaac, Miellet Sebastien
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Ageing and Dementia Research Centre, Bournemouth University, Poole, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 12;13:912446. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.912446. eCollection 2022.
As we age, many physical, perceptual and cognitive abilities decline, which can critically impact our day-to-day lives. However, the decline of many abilities is concurrent; thus, it is challenging to disentangle the relative contributions of different abilities in the performance deterioration in realistic tasks, such as road crossing, with age. Research into road crossing has shown that aging and a decline in executive functioning (EFs) is associated with altered information sampling and less safe crossing decisions compared to younger adults. However, in these studies declines in age and EFs were confounded. Therefore, it is impossible to disentangle whether age-related declines in EFs impact on visual sampling and road-crossing performance, or whether visual exploration, and road-crossing performance, are impacted by aging independently of a decline in EFs. In this study, we recruited older adults with maintained EFs to isolate the impacts of aging independently of a decline EFs on road crossing abilities. We recorded eye movements of younger adults and older adults while they watched videos of road traffic and were asked to decide when they could cross the road. Overall, our results show that older adults with maintained EFs sample visual information and make similar road crossing decisions to younger adults. Our findings also reveal that both environmental constraints and EF abilities interact with aging to influence how the road-crossing task is performed. Our findings suggest that older pedestrians' safety, and independence in day-to-day life, can be improved through a limitation of scene complexity and a preservation of EF abilities.
随着年龄的增长，许多身体、感知和认知能力都会下降，这可能会对我们的日常生活产生重大影响。然而，许多能力的下降是同时发生的；因此，要厘清不同能力在诸如过马路等现实任务中随着年龄增长而导致的表现恶化中所起的相对作用具有挑战性。对过马路的研究表明，与年轻人相比，衰老和执行功能（EFs）的下降与信息采样的改变以及不太安全的过马路决策有关。然而，在这些研究中，年龄和EFs的下降是混淆的。因此，无法厘清与年龄相关的EFs下降是否会影响视觉采样和过马路表现，或者视觉探索和过马路表现是否独立于EFs下降而受到衰老的影响。在本研究中，我们招募了EFs保持良好的老年人，以分离衰老独立于EFs下降对过马路能力的影响。我们记录了年轻人和老年人观看道路交通视频并被要求决定何时可以过马路时的眼动情况。总体而言，我们的结果表明，EFs保持良好的老年人采样视觉信息并做出与年轻人相似的过马路决策。我们的研究结果还揭示，环境限制和EFs能力都与衰老相互作用，以影响过马路任务的执行方式。我们的研究结果表明，通过限制场景复杂性和保持EFs能力，可以提高老年行人的安全性和日常生活中的独立性。
