Resilience at information processing level in older adults : maintained attention for happy faces when positive mood is low

Even though ageing is associated with declining cognitive capabilities, research has demonstrated an age-related improvement in affective well-being. This improvement can be related to increased resilience, developing as changes in emotion regulation at information-processing level. During negative mood, emotion regulation becomes a priority as demonstrated by an increased preference for positive over negative information in older adults. However, the effect of a positive mood on older adult's attentional preferences has not been established yet. To investigate this, 37 older adults were randomly assigned to a relaxation or a control condition (music). Mood state was assessed before and after the manipulation. Attentional bias was measured by an exogenous cueing task, in which the location of the target was correctly or incorrectly cued by happy, sad or neutral facial pictures. Both groups showed a decrease in negative mood (p < .001, 95% CI [2.73, 5.97], d = .82) without changes in positive mood. The relaxation group showed a significantly bigger increase in feeling relaxed (p = .017, eta(2)(p) = .15). No significant group differences were found for attentional bias. However, over the whole group, less positive mood after the manipulation was associated with more maintained attention for positive information (r = -.49, p < .01). These results indicate that older adults deploy emotion regulation strategies in attention during low positive mood. Flexible attentional processing of emotional information might serve as a resilience factor to maintain well-being during later stages of life

Visual Attention Differences Across The Lifespan: A Study of Inhibition

In 1980, Treisman and Gelade proposed a two stage process of attention. According to the Feature Integration Theory, information is first processed automatically through feature extraction while integration of these features occurs later. Feature extraction is a parallel process and therefore automatic while feature integration is a serial process and thus requires attention. Because of the attentional nature of Treisman\u27s theory, it has often been used as a paradigm for studies on attention and inhibition. The theory has also been used to highlight differences in cognitive abilities at various levels of development. In particular, it has been used to demonstrate developing attention in children as well as slowing cognitive abilities in older adults. Significantly, the frontal lobe, which has been linked to inhibition-and attention, is the last area of the brain to develop and the first to decline in adults. However, no cross sectional study has been done in which children, teenagers, adults, and older individuals have been tested on a standardized task. The ages of the participants were chosen based on developmental stages of the frontal lobe. Six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, undergraduates and people over the age of 55 all received the visual attention task. Each participant was given an individually administered standardized intelligence test and a computer task. This computer task required the use of feature extraction, feature integration, or a combination of both. Average reaction times (RT) for each cell were calculated by age group. Findings show no change in RT for the screens requiring parallel searches when the display size increased. However, for those tasks requiring serial processing (conjoined) a significantly longer RT was found for children when increase inhibition was necessary (display size increased)

Determinants of Negative Priming

The negative priming task is widely used to investigate attentional inhibition. A critical review of the negative priming literature considers various parameters of the task (e.g., time course, relation to interference, level of occurrence, and susceptibility to changes in task context). It also takes into account life span data and the performance of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. On these bases, the review suggests that negative priming can be produced by 2 mechanisms: memorial and inhibitory. With respect to inhibition, the review suggests that (a) there are 2 systems, one responsible for identity and the other for location information; and (b) inhibition is a flexible, postselection process operating to prevent recently rejected information from quickly regaining access to effectors, thus helping to establish coherence among selected thought and action streams

Effects of Aging on Visual Contour Integration and Segmentation

PURPOSE. Perception of circular disconnected contours requires the integration of relevant local orientation information across space and the suppression of irrelevant orientations. Using a detection of deviation from circularity (DFC) task, the present study examined whether the efficiency of either integrative or suppressive visual mechanisms, or both, declines with age. METHODS. Younger and older observers' sensitivities in detecting the DFC of a contour formed by Gabors were compared in three conditions: when all elements were oriented tangentially to the contour, with and without the presence of randomly oriented background noise; and when they had alternated tangential and orthogonal orientations, without background noise. RESULTS. In agreement with previous studies, the authors found that younger observers were not impaired in the mixed condition with respect to the tangential condition, suggesting the involvement of a high-level mechanism responding to the global closure information provided by tangential local orientations, even if they are interspersed with orthogonal ones. Instead, older observers were specifically impaired in the mixed condition, suggesting a reduced capability of suppressing nontangential information along the contour, and were also less efficient in suppressing irrelevant orientations in the background. CONCLUSIONS. These results support the suggestion that, whereas integrative mechanisms are not affected by age, suppressive mechanisms are. (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2011;52: 3955‐3961) DOI:10.1167/iovs.10-543

The Effects of Blocking on Selective Attention in Visual Search

In studies of attention in visual search, older adults consistently perform more poorly than young adults. In most visual attention computer tasks, simple, conjunction, and unconfounded trials are presented randomly. This study explores the possibility that older adults are slower than young adults at changing their search strategies to match each type of trial. If this is the case, blocking the trials together so that the subject sees a series of each type of trial should allow the older adults to perfect their search strategies, giving them reaction times similar to those of young adults. In this experiment, 14 young adults (mean age 18.6 years) and 5 older adults (mean age 68.6 years) were asked to perform a blocked computer search task. The results were then compared to a study performed last year. The results showed that blocking the trials significantly lowered the reaction times of older adults, but did not effect the reaction times of young adults

The Effects of Visual Field Size on Search Performance

In the fields of both cognitive development and cognitive aging, similar patterns of performance on selective attention tasks have been found between children and older adults. Presently, there exist few studies of selective attention across the lifespan. A 1995 study by Shapiro, Shapiro, Cointin, and Forbes addressed this absence through investigating search performance in a cross-sectional, life-span study. In the Shapiro et al. study, a compelling pattern of performance was found: in conjunction conditions, which require serial searches, older adults\u27 performance differed significantly from the younger adults\u27 performance across increasing display size only in target absent trials. The present study attempted to determine whether such differences arose from perceptual-motor (physiological) slowing. Four older adults (mean age = 68.25 years) and seven undergraduates (mean age = 19.57 years) volunteered. Participants responded to the presence or absence of targets within conjunction arrays of varying field and display sizes. Both reaction times (RTs) and proportion correct were measured. Overall, it was found that RTs were longest for both older and younger adults when field size and display size were large, and in target-absent trials. These results provide no support for a perceptual-motor explanation of Shapiro et al.\u27s findings. An alternative explanation, one of cognitive change, is discussed