Speaker
Description
Attention is a multifaceted process that involves several components, including alerting, orienting, and conflict resolution. These components have been extensively studied using the Attention Network Test (ANT), also to characterize attentional decline with physiological aging. However, there are several inconsistencies in the literature regarding which components are most affected by aging. Here, we addressed this issue by administering the ANT to 60 healthy participants ranging in age from 62 to 90 years. Using a multivariate regression model, we asked whether increasing participant age predicts alerting, orienting, and conflict, while controlling for general participant performance in terms of both reaction times and accuracy. For two of the three attentional components, the results showed a general and age-insensitive decline, i.e., an abolishment of the alerting effect and a large conflict effect, regardless of participants’ age. In contrast, the amplitude of spatial orienting of attention was linearly predicted by increasing age. More focused analyses revealed a selective increase in the difficulty of shifting attention from the initial (central) to the target (peripheral) location as a function of increasing participant age. Ultimately, these findings highlight the age-related difficulty in directing endogenous attention to task-relevant locations.
