Ageing, Visibility and Ignoring
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Birmingham
Department Name: School of Psychology
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Harriet Allen (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Allen H. A. (Author)
(2010)
Changing patterns of ignoring distractions in the older adult brain
Allen HA
(2012)
Similar behaviour, different brain patterns: age-related changes in neural signatures of ignoring.
in NeuroImage
Allen HA
(2010)
The role of contrast sensitivity in global motion processing deficits in the elderly.
in Journal of vision
Dent K
(2011)
Comparing segmentation by time and by motion in visual search: an FMRI investigation.
in Journal of cognitive neuroscience
Harriet Allen (Author)
(2011)
Divided attention impairs motion perception in older adults
Hutchinson CV
(2012)
Psychophysical correlates of global motion processing in the aging visual system: a critical review.
in Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
Mavritsaki E
(2011)
Bridging the gap between physiology and behavior: evidence from the sSoTS model of human visual attention.
in Psychological review
Mevorach C
(2010)
Ignoring the elephant in the room: a neural circuit to downregulate salience.
in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
| Description | In everyday life we are constantly bombarded with information. Crucial to being able to function in our jobs, homes and leisure we must orient our minds to the most pressing inputs and ignore irrelevant information. This is increasingly important for older people since not only are perceptual abilities declining but so is the ability to exclude distractions. We tested people's ability to judge motion and find a target amongst distracters. These are lab equivalents of finding a lost item or friend amongst clutter and moving through the world when, e.g. driving. We measured task performance as well as brain activity (with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Much recent work has suggested that as we age we are less able to ignore vivid distractions. We asked participants to search for a particular target item amongst similar items. We also told them that some of the items (the ones that arrived earlier or the ones that were moving, for example) would never be a target item, allowing participants to ignore that subset. We found that some, although not all, older (older than 65 years old) adults were able to ignore this subset of distractions. Those that were able to do so, however, showed very different patterns of brain activity compared to younger adults (under 25 years old) doing the same task or older adults who were not able to ignore the distractions. We also measured older adults' ability to discriminate the direction of a set of moving dots. Previous research on motion perception has provided conflicting results. We varied the visibility of the dots and found that some age-related declines in performance were not due to cognitive or high level decline but are more likely to be due to low level deficits early in the processing stream. Effectively the dots were less visible to our older participants and this made the task more demanding. We started to investigate how these changes in how we ignore distractions and judging motion translate to driving. We asked participants to view a display simulating the slowing of motion that happens when a car brakes and asked them to judge if there was a safe amount or too much or too little. We found differences between the performance of older and younger participants and these differences were even more obvious in the presence of distracters. There was more variation in older adults judgments of braking compared to young adults. There were also different patterns of errors in older, compared to younger, adults (over- versus under- estimation). Critically when a salient but irrelevant distracter was added to the display (flashing light to be ignored) older adults were much slower in their decisions than younger adults. Overall, we found that despite many reports of age-related cognitive decline, there are also instances where instead of declining performance, older adults had found new ways to perform tasks or where what had been attributed to central cognitive decline is actually a more simple, more solvable, problem. |
| Exploitation Route | This research may have longer term uses in: Training and interventions for older adults. Design of computers and aids for older adults. Road and car design Understanding how and when older adults are able to ignore distractions and when they cannot has potential for exploitation via several avenues. The theoretical and laboratory work could lead to either advice or training aimed at older adults. Given that many of our participants were able to ignore distractions successfully, this suggests that it is possible to develop compensatory strategies for age-related cognitive decline. Further research is needed before we understand the best way to implement this. During the project we investigated the potential to apply this research to driving. H Allen presented her results to the Driving standards agency and contributed to a report by the RAC into the older driver. H Allen also started working with the Transport Research Agency to develop projects to directly test distraction in older adults (ongoing). H Allen has also been awarded a CASE studentship from the EPSRC, in collaboration with JaguarLandRover and Human Factors specialists at the University of Nottingham to investigate how cognition interacts with vehicle design. |