Pedale Tiziana, Mastroberardino Serena, Tambasco Nicola, Santangelo Valerio
Department of Philosophy, Social Sciences & Education, University of Perugia, Piazza G. Ermini 1, 06123 Perugia, Italy.
Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Via Ardeatina 306, 00179 Rome, Italy.
Brain Sci. 2024 Dec 24;15(1):6. doi: 10.3390/brainsci15010006.
Attention is a complex process involving various components such as alerting, orienting, and resolving conflicts. These components have been widely examined using the Attention Network Test (ANT), which has also been used to explore attentional decline associated with aging. However, discrepancies exist in the literature regarding which specific aspects of attention are most impacted by aging. These inconsistencies could be due to methodological issues such as group comparisons that may exaggerate differences between groups while flattening subtle variations within groups. To address this issue, we administered the ANT to 60 healthy participants aged between 62 and 90 years. Using a multivariate regression analysis, we examined whether increasing age was associated with changes in alerting, orienting, and conflict resolution, while controlling for overall performance in terms of both reaction times and accuracy. The results showed a general and age-insensitive decline in two of the three attentional components: the alerting effect, which was abolished, and a large conflict effect, which was present regardless of age. In contrast, the orienting of spatial attention was found to linearly increase with increasing age. More focused analyses revealed that the ability to shift attention from the central (initial) to the peripheral (target) location slowed down as a function of age. These results suggest that aging is associated with a greater difficulty in disengaging endogenous attention from the central, uninformative cue to direct attention on task-relevant peripheral targets.
注意力是一个复杂的过程，涉及多种成分，如警觉、定向和冲突解决。这些成分已通过注意力网络测试（ANT）得到广泛研究，该测试也被用于探索与衰老相关的注意力衰退。然而，关于衰老对注意力哪些具体方面影响最大，文献中存在差异。这些不一致可能是由于方法学问题，如组间比较可能夸大组间差异，同时抹平组内的细微变化。为解决这个问题，我们对60名年龄在62岁至90岁之间的健康参与者进行了ANT测试。使用多元回归分析，我们在控制反应时间和准确性方面的整体表现的同时，研究了年龄增长是否与警觉、定向和冲突解决的变化相关。结果显示，在三个注意力成分中的两个成分中存在普遍且与年龄无关的衰退：警觉效应消失，以及无论年龄大小都存在的较大冲突效应。相比之下，空间注意力的定向被发现随着年龄增长呈线性增加。更深入的分析表明，随着年龄增长，将注意力从中央（初始）位置转移到外周（目标）位置的能力会减慢。这些结果表明，衰老与将内源性注意力从中央无信息线索上脱离出来以将注意力直接指向与任务相关的外周目标的难度增加有关。
