The influence of the visual surrounding environment in older adults and young adults’ cognitive performance: an alternative paradigm

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how the characteristics of the visual surrounding environment influence older- and young-adults’ cognitive performance. Sixty-four older adults and 64 young adults performed four visual cognitive tasks (attention and memory tasks) in two independent sessions while being exposed to a high-load and a low-load visual surrounding environment. We expected that the high-load environment would hurt the older-adults performance due to typical difficulties in ignoring irrelevant stimuli, whereas no such effect would likely occur for the young-adults whose cognitive abilities are at their best. Overall, our results were consistent with our prediction in three tasks (go/no-go, choice reaction time, and Corsi block-tapping). Additionally, the older adults performed worse than the young adults in all tasks, thus confirming expected age-related differences. Our results are consistent with those obtained when distractors and targets are presented in the same display, now using a paradigm which locates the distractors in the surrounding environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual surrounding environment
• older adults
• young adults
• attention
• memory

Acknowledgments

A special acknowledgment is due to all participants and their housing institutions (Portugal): Centros Sociais e Paroquiais de Angeja, Avanca e Sta. Joana Princesa (Aveiro), Associação Humanitária de Salreu, and Fundação Cónego Filipe de Figueiredo (Estarreja). We also thank the following undergraduate students from the University of Aveiro who collaborated in some tasks: Elisabete Gaspar, Fanny Rodrigues, Luciana Correia, Marta Lopes, Sara Félix, and Soraia Silva. We also thank the following companies for their sponsorship: Porto Editora, Caminho, and Delta Cafés. We also thank Doctor Amanda Franco for her feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In spite of the differences between tasks already noted, we opted to present all cognitive tasks simply as visual tasks, given that they all are of visual nature.

2 It should be noted that the designation of the two conditions here used serves the purpose of differentiating the two environments; we did not, objectively, assess their visual load, a concept that has been difficult to quantify (e.g., Murphy & Greene, 2016).

3 A special acknowledgment is due to the Editor and Reviewers for their constructive comments on the implications of our findings.

Additional information

Funding

The current work is part of the first author’s PhD project who was supported by a PhD fellowship [Ref. SFRH/BD/84279/2012], and Josefa N. S. Pandeirada was supported by the Investigator Grant [Ref. IF/00058/2012/CP0172/CT0002], both provided by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia).