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Category: Project

Description: Older adults tend to be more prone to distraction compared to young adults and this age-related deficit has been attributed to a deficiency in inhibitory processing. However, recent findings challenge the notion that aging leads to global impairments in inhibition. To reconcile these mixed findings, we investigated how aging modulates multiple mechanisms of attentional control including goal-directed target orienting, proactive distractor suppression, attention capture, and reactive disengagement by tracking the timing and direction of eye movements. When engaged in feature-search mode and proactive distractor suppression, older adults made fewer first fixations to the target but inhibited the task-irrelevant salient distractor as effectively as did young adults. In contrast, task-irrelevant salient distractors captured older adults’ attention significantly more than younger adults’ attention during singleton-search mode and reactive distractor disengagement. In addition to elevated attention capture, older adults showed increased fixation times in orienting to the target, longer dwell times on incorrect saccades, and increased saccadic reaction times. Thus, older adults exhibited deficiencies in goal-directed attentional control, disengagement, and processing speeds, but preserved mechanisms of proactive distractor suppression. Our findings suggest that older adults are more prone to initiating reflexive, stimulus-driven saccades over goal-oriented saccades due to longer top-down processing requirements and shifts in attentional priority within the visual cortex. We propose that aging leads to dual shifts in mechanisms of top-down and bottom-up attentional control, but that older adults still preserve mechanisms of proactive inhibition.