Age-related effects in inter-trial inhibition of attention

ABSTRACT

Young and older adults indentified the shape of a color oddball in a visual search task, and both showed faster and more accurate responses when the distractor color was passively viewed in the preceding target-absent trial than when the target color was previewed. This inter-trial effect, known as the distractor previewing effect (DPE), reflects an attentional bias that prevents attention from focusing on recently inspected features that failed to produce a target. The results showed that the DPE pattern was preserved across the lifespan, and that the age-related increase in the magnitude of the DPE appeared rooted in age-related slowing, suggesting substantial sparing of this inhibitory effect in old age.

Keywords:

• Visual search
• Attention
• Inhibition
• Aging
• Distractor previewing effect (DPE)

Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by two grants from the NSF to Alejandro Lleras, awards #0527361 and #07-46586 CAR.

Notes

¹ Kumada and Hibi (2004) also reported that young and older adults showed comparable inter-trial target repetition effects in their tasks.

² It should also be noted that the PoP and DPE have been previously dissociated in the literature. Goolsby et al. (2005) showed the participants both standard search displays for which they performed a typical PoP/DPE task and 2-color displays consisting of three red and three green diamonds for which they were cued to attend items of one color and performed a size change detection task on the attended items. They showed a PoP effect, but not the DPE. For example, after they were cued to attend the red items and to ignore green items on a 2-color display, they showed shorter RTs to a red target than a green target on the immediately following standard search display. Further, Ariga and Kawahara (2004) observed the DPE with stimuli such as faces and moving dots, which failed to give rise to PoP in the same experiments.