Center for Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Porto.
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2024 Oct;153(10):2552-2572. doi: 10.1037/xge0001649. Epub 2024 Sep 5.
Attention is a multifaceted mechanism operating on space, features, and memory. Previous studies reported both decline and preservation of attention in aging. Yet, it is unclear if healthy aging differentially affects attentional selection in these domains. To address these inconsistencies, we evaluated the ability to focus attention using a battery of 11 tasks in a large sample of younger and older adults ( = 172/174). We addressed whether (a) individual differences and aging effects are consistent across different attention tasks and (b) there is a domain-specific or domain-general age-related decline in focused attention. Both younger and older adults benefited from focusing attention on space, features, and memory representations. Confirmatory factor analysis showed substantial commonalities in baseline performance across all tasks, indicating shared variance in decision-making and memory processes. Focused-attention effects, however, formed separate factors reflecting spatial-, feature-, and memory-based attentional efficiency. Correlations between these factors were generally low and inconsistent for both age groups. This supports the view that focused attention is not a single ability. Within the same domain, some tasks showed a decline, whereas others showed improvement with aging, and, on average, attentional benefits were similar across age groups. Accordingly, our results are inconsistent with the claim that aging is associated with either domain-specific or domain-general decline in focused attention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
注意是一种多方面的机制，作用于空间、特征和记忆。先前的研究报告称，在衰老过程中，注意力既会下降，也会保持。然而，目前尚不清楚健康的衰老是否会对这些领域的注意力选择产生不同的影响。为了解决这些不一致，我们使用一系列 11 项任务对大量年轻和年长成年人（=172/174）的注意力进行了评估。我们探讨了以下两个问题：（a）个体差异和衰老效应是否在不同的注意力任务中一致，以及（b）在集中注意力方面是否存在特定于特定领域或一般性的与年龄相关的衰退。年轻和年长的成年人都受益于将注意力集中在空间、特征和记忆表现上。验证性因素分析表明，所有任务的基线表现都存在大量共性，这表明决策和记忆过程存在共同的差异。然而，集中注意力的效果形成了单独的因素，反映了基于空间、特征和记忆的注意力效率。这两个年龄组的这些因素之间的相关性通常较低且不一致。这支持了注意力不是单一能力的观点。在同一领域内，有些任务表现出下降，而有些任务则随着衰老而提高，而且，注意力的好处在年龄组之间大致相似。因此，我们的结果与衰老与集中注意力的特定领域或一般领域的衰退相关的说法不一致。
