School of Medicine and Psychology (Building 39), Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2024 Jun 26;9(1):42. doi: 10.1186/s41235-024-00569-3.
The Useful Field of View task (UFOV) is a strong and reliable predictor of crash risk in older drivers. However, while the functional domain of attention is clearly implicated in UFOV performance, the potential role of one specific attentional process remains unclear: attentional breadth (the spatial extent of the attended region around the point of visual fixation). The goal of the present study was to systematically test the role of two distinct aspects of attentional breadth, maintaining a specific breadth of attention and resizing the attended region, in UFOV performance. To this end, 135 older adults completed the UFOV and modified Navon tasks to measure their efficiency in maintaining, contracting, and expanding the breadth of attention. We then examined individual-difference associations between these aspects of attentional breadth deployment and UFOV performance. We found that performance on UFOV Subtask 2 was associated with efficient contraction of attentional breadth (i.e., resizing the attended region to a smaller area), while Subtask 3 performance was associated with the efficiency of expanding attentional breadth (i.e., resizing the attended region to a larger area). The selectivity of these relationships appears to implicate these specific deployments of attentional breadth in how people complete the task, as it suggests that these relationships are not simply attributable to shared variance in a broader domain of cognitive functioning. The implications of these results for our understanding of UFOV, as well as future research directions that test the relative contributions of different cognitive processes in predicting task performance, are discussed.
有用视野任务 (UFOV) 是预测老年驾驶员碰撞风险的有力且可靠的指标。然而，虽然注意的功能域显然与 UFOV 性能有关，但注意力广度的潜在作用仍不清楚：注意力广度（视觉固定点周围注意力区域的空间范围）。本研究的目的是系统地测试注意力广度的两个不同方面——维持特定的注意力广度和调整注意区域的大小——在 UFOV 性能中的作用。为此，135 名老年人完成了 UFOV 和修改后的纳冯任务，以测量他们在维持、收缩和扩展注意力广度方面的效率。然后，我们检查了这些注意力广度部署方面的个体差异与 UFOV 性能之间的关联。我们发现，UFOV 子任务 2 的表现与注意力广度的有效收缩（即，将注意力区域调整到较小的区域）有关，而子任务 3 的表现与注意力广度的有效扩展（即，将注意力区域调整到更大的区域）有关。这些关系的选择性似乎暗示了这些特定的注意力广度部署在人们完成任务时的作用，因为这表明这些关系不仅仅归因于更广泛的认知功能领域中的共同方差。这些结果对我们理解 UFOV 以及未来测试不同认知过程对任务表现的相对贡献的研究方向具有重要意义。
