In a study from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, older adults were no more distractible than younger adults when asked to focus attention on their sense of sight or sound, or when asked to switch attention from one sense to another.
How Does Aging Affect How Our Senses Work Together?
Researchers focused on the effects of age on multisensory attention, or the way the senses work together. According to Christina E. Hugenschmidt, a Ph.D. candidate from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, attention works in two main ways:
- Focusing attention speeds up the brain's processing of what you want to pay attention to.
- Attention slows down the processing of what you want to ignore.
"Most research has focused on distractors that occur in one sense at a time, like ignoring only certain red signs or recognizing one sound that is different in a series of sounds," Hugenschmidt.
"However, we all know that distractions can come across sensory systems as well. We often do things automatically to minimize this multisensory distraction, like turning down the radio in the car to concentrate on finding an address."
How the Aging and Attention Study Was Conducted
The Wake Forest Baptist researchers wanted to find out if older adults had a harder time paying attention, and if they were affected differently in their ability to enhance or suppress relevant information.
"There are two kinds of attention we were interested in studying -- voluntary attention and involuntary attention," said Paul J. Laurienti, M.D., Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor of radiology.
"We all know that we can choose to focus on one sense and ignore another. For instance, you might be able to ignore the sounds of the television while you read the paper. But sometimes a very salient stimulus can capture your attention anyway -- for instance, if the fire alarm went off while you were reading the paper."
Voluntary attention was measured by comparing how much people’s responses were sped up if they knew they were going to see or hear a target, and how much they were slowed down if they were expecting a target in another sense. For example, responses to a red light tend to be faster when participants expect to see a light and slower when they saw the light, but expected to hear a sound.
To measure involuntary attention, participants performed the same tasks but were not told what to expect. Researchers compared visual tasks that were preceded by other visual tasks with visual tasks that were preceded by auditory tasks. This allowed them to measure how quick
ly the participants could switch from one sense to the other.
Aging Does Not Guarantee Poor Attention
"These data showed that older adults still successfully engaged their attention, both in terms of speeding up and slowing down,” said Hugenschmidt. She also said that older adults were similar to younger adults in how much of their attention was captured involuntarily.
"Even as we age, this study suggests that the brain's ability to engage multisensory attention [for example, hearing the phone while reading a book] remains intact."
