Experimental Psychology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-0487-2609.
J Vis. 2024 Jun 3;24(6):8. doi: 10.1167/jov.24.6.8.
When interacting with the environment, humans typically shift their gaze to where information is to be found that is useful for the upcoming action. With increasing age, people become slower both in processing sensory information and in performing their movements. One way to compensate for this slowing down could be to rely more on predictive strategies. To examine whether we could find evidence for this, we asked younger (19-29 years) and older (55-72 years) healthy adults to perform a reaching task wherein they hit a visual target that appeared at one of two possible locations. In separate blocks of trials, the target could appear always at the same location (predictable), mainly at one of the locations (biased), or at either location randomly (unpredictable). As one might expect, saccades toward predictable targets had shorter latencies than those toward less predictable targets, irrespective of age. Older adults took longer to initiate saccades toward the target location than younger adults, even when the likely target location could be deduced. Thus we found no evidence of them relying more on predictive gaze. Moreover, both younger and older participants performed more saccades when the target location was less predictable, but again no age-related differences were found. Thus we found no tendency for older adults to rely more on prediction.
当与环境相互作用时，人类通常会将目光转向有信息的地方，这些信息对即将到来的行动是有用的。随着年龄的增长，人们在处理感官信息和执行动作时都会变得越来越慢。一种补偿这种减速的方法可能是更多地依赖预测策略。为了检验我们是否能找到证据证明这一点，我们要求年轻（19-29 岁）和年长（55-72 岁）的健康成年人执行一项伸手任务，在任务中他们会击打出现在两个可能位置之一的视觉目标。在单独的试验块中，目标可以始终出现在同一位置（可预测），主要出现在一个位置（有偏向），或者随机出现在任一位置（不可预测）。正如人们可能预期的那样，对于可预测的目标，扫视的潜伏期比那些不太可预测的目标要短，无论年龄如何。即使可以推断出目标的可能位置，年长的成年人也比年轻的成年人需要更长的时间来开始扫视目标位置。因此，我们没有发现他们更多地依赖预测性注视的证据。此外，无论是年轻人还是老年人，当目标位置不太可预测时，他们都会进行更多的扫视，但再次没有发现与年龄相关的差异。因此，我们没有发现老年人更倾向于依赖预测的趋势。
