The role of sensory modality in age-related distraction: a critical review and a renewed view

Selective attention requires the ability to focus on relevant information and to ignore irrelevant information. The ability to inhibit irrelevant information has been proposed to be the main source of age-related cognitive change (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1988). Although age-related distraction by irrelevant information has been extensively demonstrated in the visual modality, studies involving auditory and cross-modal paradigms have revealed a mixed pattern of results. A comparative evaluation of these paradigms according to sensory modality suggests a twofold trend: Age-related distraction is more likely (a) in unimodal than in cross-modal paradigms and (b) when irrelevant information is presented in the visual modality, rather than in the auditory modality. This distinct pattern of age-related changes in selective attention may be linked to the reliance of the visual and auditory modalities on different filtering mechanisms. Distractors presented through the auditory modality can be filtered at both central and peripheral neurocognitive levels. In contrast, distractors presented through the visual modality are primarily suppressed at more central levels of processing, which may be more vulnerable to aging. We propose the hypothesis that age-related distractibility is modality dependent, a notion that might need to be incorporated in current theories of cognitive aging. Ultimately, this might lead to a more accurate account for the mixed pattern of impaired and preserved selective attention found in advancing age.     

Aging and response interference across sensory modalities

Advancing age is associated with decrements in selective attention. It was recently hypothesized that age-related differences in selective attention depend on sensory modality. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related vulnerability to distraction, using a response interference task. To this end, 16 younger (mean age = 23.1 years) and 24 older (mean age = 65.3 years) adults performed four response interference tasks, involving all combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors. The results showed that response interference effects differ across sensory modalities, but not across age groups. These results indicate that sensory modality plays an important role in vulnerability to distraction, but not in age-related distractibility by irrelevant spatial information.     

Making sense of age-related distractibility: The critical role of sensory modality

Older adults are known to have reduced inhibitory control and therefore to be more distractible than young adults. Recently, we have proposed that sensory modality plays a crucial role in age-related distractibility. In this study, we examined age differences in vulnerability to unimodal and cross-modal visual and auditory distraction. A group of 24 younger (mean age = 21.7 years) and 22 older adults (mean age = 65.4 years) performed visual and auditory n-back tasks while ignoring visual and auditory distraction. Whereas reaction time data indicated that both young and older adults are particularly affected by unimodal distraction, accuracy data revealed that older adults, but not younger adults, are vulnerable to cross-modal visual distraction. These results support the notion that age-related distractibility is modality dependent.     

Effects of age on cross-modal emotion perception

Efficient navigation of our social world depends on the generation, interpretation, and combination of social signals within different sensory systems. However, the influence of healthy adult aging on multisensory integration of emotional stimuli remains poorly explored. This article comprises 2 studies that directly address issues of age differences on cross-modal emotional matching and explicit identification. The first study compared 25 younger adults (19-40 years) and 25 older adults (60-80 years) on their ability to match cross-modal congruent and incongruent emotional stimuli. The second study looked at performance of 20 younger (19-40) and 20 older adults (60-80) on explicit emotion identification when information was presented congruently in faces and voices or only in faces or in voices. In Study 1, older adults performed as well as younger adults on tasks in which congruent auditory and visual emotional information were presented concurrently, but there were age-related differences in matching incongruent cross-modal information. Results from Study 2 indicated that though older adults were impaired at identifying emotions from 1 modality (faces or voices alone), they benefited from congruent multisensory information as age differences were eliminated. The findings are discussed in relation to social, emotional, and cognitive changes with age.     

The effects of aging on the working memory processes of multimodal information

Normal aging is associated with deficits in working memory processes. However, the majority of research has focused on storage or inhibitory processes using unimodal paradigms, without addressing their relationships using different sensory modalities. Hence, we pursued two objectives. First, was to examine the effects of aging on storage and inhibitory processes. Second, was to evaluate aging effects on multisensory integration of visual and auditory stimuli. To this end, young and older participants performed a multimodal task for visual and auditory pairs of stimuli with increasing memory load at encoding and interference during retention. Our results showed an age-related increased vulnerability to interrupting and distracting interference reflecting inhibitory deficits related to the off-line reactivation and on-line suppression of relevant and irrelevant information, respectively. Storage capacity was impaired with increasing task demands in both age groups. Additionally, older adults showed a deficit in multisensory integration, with poorer performance for new visual compared to new auditory information.     

Improving visual spatial working memory in younger and older adults: effects of cross-modal cues

Spatially informative auditory and vibrotactile (cross-modal) cues can facilitate attention but little is known about how similar cues influence visual spatial working memory (WM) across the adult lifespan. We investigated the effects of cues (spatially informative or alerting pre-cues vs. no cues), cue modality (auditory vs. vibrotactile vs. visual), memory array size (four vs. six items), and maintenance delay (900 vs. 1800 ms) on visual spatial location WM recognition accuracy in younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA). We observed a significant interaction between spatially informative pre-cue type, array size, and delay. OA and YA benefitted equally from spatially informative pre-cues, suggesting that attentional orienting prior to WM encoding, regardless of cue modality, is preserved with age. Contrary to predictions, alerting pre-cues generally impaired performance in both age groups, suggesting that maintaining a vigilant state of arousal by facilitating the alerting attention system does not help visual spatial location WM.     

注意分配与注意选择能力的年龄差异比较

为了考察注意能力的年龄差异,分别从注意分配能力和注意选择能力两个方面对青年和老年被试的表现进行了比较。结果表明：青、老年在注意分配能力上没有显着的差异;而青、老年在注意选择能力上却有显着的差异,老年的注意选择能力有显着的衰退。因此,注意能力衰退对认知年老化的影响可能更主要的是来自于注意控制能力的衰退。     

Age differences in dual-task interference are localized to response-generation processes

Dual-task differences in younger and older adults were explored by presenting 2 simple tasks, with the onset of the 2nd task relative to the 1st task carefully controlled. The possibility of an age-related reduction in the ability to generate and execute 2 similar motor programs was explored by requiring either a manual response to both tasks or a manual response to the 1st and an oral response to the 2nd and was confirmed by the evidence. The age-related interference was greater than would be expected from a general slowing of processing in older adults. The possibility of an age-related reduction in the capacity to process 2 tasks in the same perceptual input modality was explored by presenting both tasks in the visual modality or the 1st task in the auditory modality and the 2nd task in the visual modality and was not supported by the evidence. There was greater interference when both tasks were in the same modality, but it was equivalent for older and younger adults. Age differences in dual-task interference appear quite localized to response-generation processes.     

A behavioral study of distraction by vibrotactile novelty

Past research has demonstrated that the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant changes in the auditory or visual sensory channels captured attention in an obligatory fashion, hindering behavioral performance in ongoing auditory or visual categorization tasks and generating orientation and re-orientation electrophysiological responses. We report the first experiment extending the behavioral study of cross-modal distraction to tactile novelty. Using a vibrotactile-visual cross-modal oddball task and a bespoke hand-arm vibration device, we found that participants were significantly slower at categorizing the parity of visually presented digits following a rare and unexpected change in vibrotactile stimulation (novelty distraction), and that this effect extended to the subsequent trial (postnovelty distraction). These results are in line with past research on auditory and visual novelty and fit the proposition of common and amodal cognitive mechanisms for the involuntary detection of change.     

正常老化对视觉早期注意的影响——来自ERP的证据

选择性注意能够作用于视觉信息加工的不同阶段。各个注意阶段均受到老化过程的影响,其中注意早期阶段的老化研究对于理解认知老化的发生机制有重要意义。本文系统地梳理了刺激前的注意预期阶段以及刺激后200 ms内的早期感知注意阶段的正常老年人和青年人ERP比较研究,以探讨正常老化对视觉早期注意的影响。现有证据表明,相对于青年人,正常老年人：(1)多个早期ERP注意效应(包括注意预期ADAN,早期空间注意N1,以及特征注意SP和SN)在潜伏期上都存在显著延迟;(2)在振幅上,不同ERP注意效应的老化表现存在差异：某些ERP成分(包括注意预期EDAN,以及早期空间注意P1)的注意效应没有明显减弱,而某些ERP成分(包括注意预期alpha,早期空间注意N1,以及特征注意SN)的注意效应受到老化调控;(3)一些注意效应(包括特征注意SP成分,以及客体注意P1和N1成分)的目标增强机制保留,而干扰抑制机制缺损。目前已有研究在老化对注意效应振幅的调控上还存在不一致,这可能与研究的信噪比、任务难度、注意机制分离以及老年人的个体差异有关。未来研究应考虑这些因素以更好地探究正常老化对视觉早期注意的影响。     

Perception of the duration of auditory and visual stimuli in children and adults

This experiment investigated the effect of modality on temporal discrimination in children aged 5 and 8 years and adults using a bisection task with visual and auditory stimuli ranging from 200 to 800 ms. In the first session, participants were required to compare stimulus durations with standard durations presented in the same modality (within-modality session), and in the second session in different modalities (cross-modal session). Psychophysical functions were orderly in all age groups, with the proportion of long responses (judgement that a duration was more similar to the long than to the short standard) increasing with the stimulus duration, although functions were flatter in the 5-year-olds than in the 8-year-olds and adults. Auditory stimuli were judged to be longer than visual stimuli in all age groups. The statistical results and a theoretical model suggested that this modality effect was due to differences in the pacemaker speed of the internal clock. The 5-year-olds also judged visual stimuli as more variable than auditory ones, indicating that their temporal sensitivity was lower in the visual than in the auditory modality.     

Aging and performance on an everyday-based visual search task

Research on aging and visual search often requires older people to search computer screens for target letters or numbers. The aim of this experiment was to investigate age-related differences using an everyday-based visual search task in a large participant sample (n=261) aged 20-88 years. Our results show that: (1) old-old adults have more difficulty with triple conjunction searches with one highly distinctive feature compared to young-old and younger adults; (2) age-related declines in conjunction searches emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age; (3) age-related declines are evident in feature searches on target absent trials, as older people seem to exhaustively and serially search the whole display to determine a target's absence. Together, these findings suggest that declines emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age in feature integration, guided search, perceptual grouping and/or spreading suppression processes. Discussed are implications for enhancing everyday functioning throughout adulthood.     

Paying Attention to Time as One Gets Older

Age-related changes in attention and interval timing as a function of time of day were examined using a temporal bisection task with single and compound auditory and visual stimuli. Half of the participants in each age group were tested in the morning, and half were tested in the afternoon. Duration judgments were found to be shorter for visual signals than for auditory signals. This discrepancy was greater in the morning than in the afternoon and larger for the older than for the younger adults. Young adults showed equal sensitivity to signal duration for single and compound trials and higher sensitivity in the afternoon than in the morning for both signal modalities. In contrast, older adults showed impaired sensitivity on compound trials and the greatest sensitivity overall to single visual trials in the morning. These results suggest that age-related reductions in attentional resources may cause older adults to focus on signals that require controlled attention during specific phases of the circadian cycle.     

The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task

Unexpected stimuli are often able to distract us away from a task at hand. The present study seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Studies of involuntary attention capture using the oddball task have repeatedly shown that infrequent auditory changes in a series of otherwise repeating sounds trigger an automatic response to the novel or deviant stimulus. This attention capture has been shown to disrupt participants' behavioral performance in a primary task, even when distractors and targets are asynchronous and presented in distinct sensory modalities. This distraction effect is generally considered as a by-product of the capture of attention by the novel or deviant stimulus, but the exact cognitive locus of this effect and the interplay between attention capture and target processing has remained relatively ignored. The present study reports three behavioral experiments using a cross-modal oddball task to examine whether the distraction triggered by auditory novelty affects the processing of the target stimuli. Our results showed that variations in the demands placed on the visual analysis (Experiment 1) or categorical processing of the target (Experiment 2) did not impact on distraction. Instead, the cancellation of distraction by the presentation of an irrelevant visual stimulus presented immediately before the visual target (Experiment 3) suggested that distraction originated in the shifts of attention occurring between attention capture and the onset of the target processing. Possible accounts of these shifts are discussed.     

On asymmetries in cross-modal spatial attention orienting

In a previous study, Ward (1994) reported that spatially uninformative visual cues orient auditory attention but that spatially uninformative auditory cues fail to orient visual attention. This cross-modal asymmetry is consistent with other intersensory perceptual phenomena that are dominated by the visual modality (e.g., ventriloquism). However, Spence and Driver (1997) found exactly the opposite asymmetry under different experimental conditions and with a different task. In spite of the several differences between the two studies, Spence and Driver (see also Driver & Spence, 1998) argued that Ward's findings might have arisen from response-priming effects, and that the cross-modal asymmetry they themselves reported, in which auditory cues affect responses to visual targets but not vice versa, is in fact the correct result. The present study investigated cross-modal interactions in stimulus-driven spatial attention orienting under Ward's complex cue environment conditions using an experimental procedure that eliminates response-priming artifacts. The results demonstrate that the cross-modal asymmetry reported by Ward (1994) does occur when the cue environment is complex. We argue that strategic effects in cross-modal stimulus-driven orienting of attention are responsible for the opposite asymmetries found by Ward and by Spence and Driver (1997).     

Switching attention between modalities: further evidence for visual dominance

The present study examined cross-modal selective attention using a task-switching paradigm. In a series of experiments, we presented lateralized visual and auditory stimuli simultaneously and asked participants to make a spatial decision according to either the visual or the auditory stimulus. We observed consistent cross-modal interference in the form of a spatial congruence effect. This effect was asymmetrical, with higher costs when responding to auditory than to visual stimuli. Furthermore, we found stimulus-modality-shift costs, indicating a persisting attentional bias towards the attended stimulus modality. We discuss our findings with respect to visual dominance, directed-attention accounts, and the modality-appropriateness hypothesis.     

Cognitive and neuropsychological underpinnings of relational and conjunctive working memory binding across age

The ability to form associations (i.e., binding) is critical for memory formation. Recent studies suggest that aging specifically affects relational binding (associating separate features) but not conjunctive binding (integrating features within an object). Possibly, this dissociation may be driven by the spatial nature of the studies so far. Alternatively, relational binding may simply require more attentional resources. We assessed relational and conjunctive binding in three age groups and we included an interfering task (i.e., an articulatory suppression task). Binding was examined in a working memory (WM) task using non-spatial features: shape and colour. Thirty-one young adults (mean age = 22.35), 30 middle-aged adults (mean age = 54.80) and 30 older adults (mean age = 70.27) performed the task. Results show an effect of type of binding and an effect of age but no interaction between type of binding and age. The interaction between type of binding and interference was significant. These results indicate that aging affects relational binding and conjunctive binding similarly. However, relational binding is more susceptible to interference than conjunctive binding, which suggests that relational binding may require more attentional resources. We suggest that a general decline in WM resources associated with frontal dysfunction underlies age-related deficits in WM binding.     

Measurement of auditory cues in drivers' distraction

A driving simulator was used to examine the effects on driving performance of auditory cues in an in-vehicle information search task. Drivers' distraction by the search tasks was measured on a peripheral detection task. The difficulty of the search task was systematically varied to test the distraction caused by a quantified visual load. 58 participants completed the task. Performance on both search tasks and peripheral detection tasks was measured by mean response time and percent error. Analyses indicated that in-vehicle information search performance can be severely degraded when a target is located within a group of diverse distractors. Inclusion of an auditory cue in the visual search increased the mean response time as a result of a change in modality from auditory to visual. Inclusion of such an auditory cue seemed to influence distraction as measured by performance on the peripheral detection task; accuracy was lower when auditory cues were provided, and responses were slower when no auditory cues were provided. Distraction by the auditory cue varied according to the difficulty of the search task.     

The Development of Selective Attention in Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

The influence of age on a selective attention task was studied in a sample of children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The impact of methylphenidate (MPH) treatment on selective attention was also investigated in the children with ADHD. Two age groups of children with ADHD and two age groups of control children were tested using a timed computer task. The task consisted of identifying visual target stimuli under various distracter conditions. Distracters varied on the basis of modality (i.e., visual, auditory, or both) and task relevance (i.e., meaningful or irrelevant). Reaction times and accuracy were measured. Children with ADHD were less efficient on the selective attention task than were children without ADHD, and older children were more efficient than younger children in both groups. Children without ADHD were influenced more by the nature of distracters than were children with ADHD. For children with ADHD, MPH improved performance overall.     

保留的跨通道启动与老化：对于近期观点的总结

通道内重复启动的研究提示老年人内隐记忆未受损, 这不只体现在视觉通道上还包括其他感觉通道(例如触觉、听觉和嗅觉)。然而很少有研究考察启动任务是否具有通道特异性。在以年轻人为被试的研究中发现跨通道迁移(视觉到触觉和触觉到视觉)和通道内迁移(视觉到视觉, 触觉到触觉)具有相似性。一项最近的研究进一步探索老年人在跨通道启动任务上是否受损。结果显示视觉和触觉间的跨通道启动在年轻被试和老年被试上都是保留的且具有对称性。并且, 对于自然声响、图片的通道内和跨通道启动任务随着年老化发展仍旧保留。这些行为结果和其它最近神经科学结果显示跨通道启动发生于枕叶后纹状皮层区, 而这一区域在老年人中未损坏。这一领域未来的研究方向包括利用不同知觉通道间、利用熟悉的和新异的刺激并结合行为的和脑成像的方法, 通过设计完善的跨通道启动来研究正常老人与阿尔兹海默病人, 还包括将设计得完善的启动任务包括在用于改善老年人记忆功能的项目中。