ATTENTION/INHIBITION

_____ is a filter, and takes out irrelevant information and focusing on the important information

attention

what is attention responsible for?

• Preparing, maintaining, preparing, processing of different aspects of experience 

• Managing and coordinating of tasks 

Focused attention

• Concentrate for a long time 

Sustained attention

• Focused attention for a very long period of time

Switching and divided attention 

• Switching between stimuli, focusing on one at at a time

• dividing attention is trying to do many things all at once

Selective attention

• Tuning out unimportant things, and paying attention to the important things 

Hasher + zacks (1988) - seminal article for attention/inhibition

• Aging is associated with the decline in the inhibitory mechanisms/components of attention 

• Older people can excite information, but they cannot inhibit as well 

• Older people recalled less, and recalled things that are not specific/irrelevant 

Access function

• preventing irrelevant info from gaining access to the focus of attention

  • Ex. older adults slower at reading aloud when there is a distraction inserted in unpredictable places

Deletion function

• delete irrelevant information from the focus of attention 

  • Ex. testing mem. capacity → start using shorter lists and eventually adding to the list length

    • Older adults do worse when starting with shorter lists

    • Older adults do better when starting longer lists 

Restraint function

• suppress/restrain responses that are inappropriate for the current situation  

  • Ex. task where you have to press space when there is a green dot, tone → no space bar pushing

Evidence: interference effects of stroop colour-word test in childhood, adulthood, and aging (Comalli et al. 1962)

• Purpose: test development trajectory of inhibition across lifespan using stroop interference as a measure of inhibition 

• Participants: 7-80 year olds

• Procedure: stroop task 

• Results: stroop effect → greatest with 7 year olds

  • Decreases with increasing age up to 17-19

  • Remains constant during middle years 25-45

  • Increases with older age groups 65-80

• Interpretation: assuming stroop interference indicated inhibitory efficiency, study is evidence that inhibitory efficiency declined in older age 

Negative priming paradigm

• Logic: 

  • If internal representations of a distractor is associated with inhibition during target selection → processing of stimulus needing the inhibited response should be impaired

• Initial distractor becomes target → slower in response compared to previous response 

• If good at inhibition → slower response

• If bad at inhibition → same response time

Negative priming paradigm - Procedure

• Prime trial (target + distractor present)

• Probe display (target + distractor present) 

• Critical trials (IR [ignore-repeat], distractor from the prime becoming target in the probe)

• NP is slower responding in IR trials compared to control trials (where probe target is unprimed) 

Evidence: age and inhibition

• Hasher and Zacks 1991

• Purpose: test inhibition hypothesis that aging is associated with a decline in inhibition using negative priming as measure of inhibition

• Participants: young and old. Cross sectional design

• Procedure: negative priming procedure 

  • Control: no repeats of target and distractor

  • Experimental: distractor in prime becomes target in probe 

• Results

  • Young people showed negative priming

  • Old people did not show negative priming (just as fast as choosing the target in both prime and probe) 

• Interpretation

  • Less efficient inhibition on the part of the old, evidence of decline inhibition 

  • Suggests Inhibition is general mechanism that is generally vulnerable

Evidence: less attentional selectivity as a result of declining inhibition in older adults

• Tipper 1991

• Purpose: test inhibition that aging is associated with decline in inhibition using negative priming and interference as measures of inhibition

• Participants

  • Young and old, cross sectional

• Procedure

  • Negative priming and interference task 

  • Name the objects that is shown under the plus sign that one is focusing on 

  • How long does it take for one to name the picture 

• Neutral condition

  • Distractor is not an actual object that has a name -> easily ignored

• Control condition

  • Distractor in prime is unrelated to target in probe 

• Ignored repetition

  • Distractor in prime is target in probe (thing you ignored is now the target) 

• Results

  • Interference effects: measure ability to ignore stimuli during distraction 

    • Young and old showed interference

    • Old people showed more interference 

  • Negative priming

    • Young people showed negative priming, old people did not 

• Interpretation: evidence of decline in inhibition with age using two measures of inhibition 

Skin conducting orient response (SCOR) 

Evidence: AGING, SELECTIVE ATTENTION, AND INHIBITORY PROCESSES: A PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL APPROACH

• Mcdowd and Filion 1992

• Purpose: use psychological paradigm involving elicitation and habituation of the orienting response (OR) to test if aging is associated with a decline in inhibition

  • Psychologically, one measure of OR is a momentary increase in skin conductance 

  • Orienting response → moving head to where the sound is coming from 

  • Skin conductance comes after a tone

• Participants: old and young, cross sectional

• Procedure: 

  • Listen to innocuous tones presented randomly while listening to taped play

  • Tones presented at low loudness points in that play

• 2x2 design

• Results

  • Young adults told ot ignore habituated quicker than young adults told to attend

  • Old adults did not differ when tole to ignore or attend

  • Attend vs ignore tones: 

    • Young differ in habituation rate

    • Old do not differ 

• Interpretation

  • Decline in efficiency in attention due to the inhibition component

  • Decrease in inhibition

    • Old are not inhibiting as well as the young

Directed forgetting

Evidence: AGING AND SUPPRESSION: MEMORY FOR PREVIOUSLY RELEVANT INFORMATION

• Hartman and hasher 1991

• Presented with fill in the blank sentences 

• Purpose: test if ability to inhibit internally generated irrelevant information decreases with age

• Participants: young and old, cross sectional

• Procedures:

  • Phase 1 prime

    • High cloze sentence → high probability of prediction of the ending (expected ending) 

    • Actual ending is different than the expected and is surprising

      • Makes sense semantically but is not expected 

      • Participants need to remember the actual ending 

  • Phase 2 probe 

    • Moderate cloze → moderately predictive if the expected but disconfirmed word 

    • If participants keep using the expected but not confirmed word → had worse inhibiting

    • If participants are able to use actual endings/words → had better inhibiting 

• Results

  • Young adults: showed no priming effect for disconfirmed incorrect endings → remembered the unexpected word and inhibited the disconfirmed word

  • Older adults: priming for both endings that is confirmed and disconfirmed were used

• Interpretation: 

  • Older adults not as good inhibiting internally generated distraction

  • Difficulty inhibiting irrelevant information and are not quick to suppress thoughts that are inadvertently activated

Fan effect 

• Gerard, Zacks, Hasher, and Radvansky 1991

• Purpose: test if aging is associated with a decline in the ability to inhibit internally generated distraction using fan effect paradigm as test 

• Participants: old and young, cross sectional

• Procedure: fan effect

  • Study phase

  • Memory test

  • DV: decision time on recognition test and error rate

  • IV: fan size (1-1 or 2-2 or 3-3)

• Study phase

  • List of 18 facts

    • Ex. the doctor took the car for a short test drive

    • Ex. the judge cut the apple pie into six pieces 

  • Each person and activity appeared in 1-3 facts 

• Memory test

  • Target

    • The doctor took the car for a short test drive

  • Unstudied foil (combo of activities and people that was not found in the list of facts

    • The doctor cut the apple pie into six pieces 

• Results

  • Young and old showed fan size (takes longer to retrieve facts as fan size increases/number of times people and activity were used)

  • Age x fan interaction

    • Decision time for fan size 3-3 minus 1-1 = 710ms for old

    • Decision time for fan size 3-3 minus 1-1 = 387ms for young

    • Decision time is twice the time for older compared to younger

• Interpretation

  • Decrease in inhibition → old less ability to inhibit irrelevant information 

Neuroimaging example

Evidence: top down suppression deficit underlies working memory impairment in normal aging 

• Gazzaley, Cooney, Rissman, and D’Esposito 2005

• Purpose: test inhibitory deficit hypothesis that aging is associated with a decline in the inhibitory component of selective attention using neuroimaging data 

• Participants: young and old, cross sectional design with thin subject manipulation 

• Procedure:

  • 3 conditions (stimuli stayed same, instructions different)

  • 4 pictures, 800ms for each face/scene picture → 9s delay → 1s for response → measure activation in ignore and remember and compared to passive 

    • Ignore scenes (ignore scenes, remember faces)

    • Remember scenes (ignore faces, remember scenes)

    • Passive view (no memory instruction)

• Results

  • Remember scenes:

    • Y and O both have activation of scene processing area (left parahippocampal region)

  • Ignore scenes: 

    • Y had less activation during the ignore condition than passive view

    • O had same activation during ignore condition and passive view 

• Interpretation: 

  • activation/excitation is okay in aging

    • When you should process the scene you do in the rmbr scenes condition 

  • Inhibition declines in aging, older not able to suppress