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ABSTRACT
Focusing on relevant information while suppressing the irrelevant one are critical abilities for different cognitive processes. However, their functioning has been scarcely investigated in the working memory (WM) domain, in both healthy and pathological conditions. The present research aimed to study these abilities in aging and Parkinson’s disease (PD), testing three groups of healthy participants (young, older and elderly) and one of PD patients, employing a new experimental paradigm. Results showed that the transient storing of irrelevant information in WM causes substantial interference effects, which were remarkable in elderly individuals on both response latency and accuracy. Interestingly, PD patients responded faster and were equally accurate compared to a matched control group. Taken together, findings confirm the existence of similar mechanisms for orienting attention inwards to WM contents or outwards to perceptual stimuli, and suggest the suitability of our task to assess WM functioning in both healthy aging and PD.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Dr. Alice Maier and Dr. Viola Bulgari for their help in data collection.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplemental material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.
Notes
1. One elderly participant had a ΔRT of −5.53 in the congruent condition, that is a value that is more than 10 standard deviations (SD) away from the mean of his group (mean ΔRT = –3; SD = .55) and was therefore excluded as an outlier.
2. Data about ΣRT and ΣAC are presented in Table 2A (see supplementary material).
3. The analysis was run on the ΔRT values of 38 participants, since one healthy elderly participant was removed as an outlier (see footnote 1).