Age-related differences in the attentional white bear

Brandon K Ashinoff,Carmel Mevorach,Yehoshua Tsal

doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01622-9

Abstract

The cognitive aging literature suggests that aging populations exhibit impairments in the proactive inhibition of attention. Although proactive inhibition is often preceded by the allocation of attention toward the predicted or known spatial location of to-be-ignored stimuli, proactive allocation of attention has not been assessed in aging populations. In this study, an older and younger cohort engaged in the attentional-white-bear paradigm which measures proactive allocation of attention. In this task, on 80% of trials, participants must identify a centrally located letter surrounded by congruent or incongruent flanker letters. The flanker locations are fixed and predictable within each block of the study. On 20% of trials, they must identify which of two dots appear first on the screen. One dot appears in the same location as the flanker, and one appears in an empty location during the flanker task. The typical white-bear effect is that, despite the dots appearing at the same time, participants more often report the dot in the location of the flanker (i.e., the potentially to-be-ignored location) to appear first. The magnitude of this effect is interpreted as the magnitude of attentional allocation prior to inhibition. In Experiment 1, there was no difference in the magnitude of the attentional white bear between younger and aging cohorts. However, when the attentional system was sufficiently taxed by reducing the flanker presentation (Experiments 2a and 2b), age-related differences emerged. In particular, older participants showed a reduced white-bear effect, reflecting a potential impairment in the proactive allocation of attention toward the location of expected distractors.

Highlights

The cognitive aging literature suggests that aging populations exhibit impairments in the proactive inhibition of attention
This is important because several researchers have argued that a prominent aspect of cognitive aging is a decline in the ability to proactively ignore distracting information
Some accounts of inhibition processes suggest that an initial allocation of attention toward distractors is necessary for their inhibition. This may have important implications for inhibition-deficit theories of cognitive aging (e.g., Lustig, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007) because impairments in attentional allocation prior to inhibition could result in cascading effects that would appear as inhibition deficits

Summary

Introduction

The cognitive aging literature suggests that aging populations exhibit impairments in the proactive inhibition of attention. An older and younger cohort engaged in the attentional-white-bear paradigm which measures proactive allocation of attention In this task, on 80% of trials, participants must identify a centrally located letter surrounded by congruent or incongruent flanker letters. The typical white-bear effect is that, despite the dots appearing at the same time, participants more often report the dot in the location of the flanker (i.e., the potentially to-be-ignored location) to appear first The magnitude of this effect is interpreted as the magnitude of attentional allocation prior to inhibition. Recent research has shown that older participants tend to favor reactive over proactive control strategies (Jimura & Braver, 2010; Paxton, Barch, Racine, & Braver, 2008), due to a presumed agerelated impairment to proactive control mechanisms These studies generally report age-related impairments related to the proactive inhibition of attention. This study attempts to fill in this gap in the literature by investigating whether proactive allocation of attention prior to inhibition is impaired in aging populations

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