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Dec. 20 - Older Adults Not More Distractible

Despite previous research suggesting older adults are more easily distracted, new research performed at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center shows they’re no more distractible than younger adults when asked to focus their attention on their sense of sight or sound, or when asked to switch their attention from one sense to the other.

The research, which focused on the effects of age on multisensory attention, is part of the Processing of Multiple Individual Senses in the Elderly study, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Attention works in two main ways, explained Christina Hugenschmidt, a PhD candidate at Wake Forest School of Medicine, who presented the results. It speeds up the brain's processing of what you want to pay attention to, and 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’s different in a series of sounds," she said. "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."

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, said Paul Laurienti, MD, PhD, lead researcher and associate professor of radiology: "There are two kinds of attention we were interested in studying -- voluntary attention and involuntary attention. 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 sped up if they knew they were going to see or hear a target, and how much they 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 it, but expected to hear a sound. To measure involuntary attention, participants performed the same tasks, but weren’t told what to expect. Researchers compared visual tasks preceded by other visual tasks against visual tasks preceded by auditory tasks. This allowed them to measure how quickly participants could switch from one sense to the other. The study involved 48 participants and compared the results of the half between 18 and 38 with the other half, who were between 65 and 90.

"These data showed that older adults still successfully engaged their attention, both in terms of speeding up and slowing down,” said Hugenschmidt. “Older adults were also quite 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 remains intact."

Source: Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

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