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Abstract
Background: Although numerous studies have suggested that the gradually increasing selective preference for positive information over negative information in older adults depends on cognitive control processes, few have reported the characteristics of different attention stages in the emotional processing of older individuals. The present study used a real-time eye-tracking technique to disentangle the attentional engagement and disengagement processes involved in age-related positivity effect (PE).Methods: Eye movement data from a spatial-cueing task were obtained for 32 older and 32 younger healthy participants. The spatial-cueing task with varied cognitive loads appeared to be an effective way to explore the role of cognitive control during the attention engagement and disengagement stages of emotion processing.Results: Compared with younger adults, older participants showed more positive gaze preferences when cognitive resources were sufficient for face processing at the attention engagement stage. However, the age-related PE was not observed at the attention disengagement stage because older adults had more difficulty disengaging from fearful faces than did the younger adults due to the consumption of attention by the explicit target judgment.Conclusion: The present study highlights how cognitive control moderates positive gaze preferences at different attention processing stages. These findings may have far-reaching implications for understanding, preventing, and intervening in unsuccessful aging and, thus, in promoting active and healthy aging.
Highlights
In the later years of life, various functioning areas in older adults, in specific cognitive domains, decline with age (Beaudreau and O’Hara, 2008)
This study provided some neurobiological evidence that positivity effect” (PE) depends on cognitive control resources, it emphasized the importance of the cognitive control effect on attentional disengagement and did not differentiate the time processes of attentional engagement and disengagement in isolation
This study further explored different attentional stages of emotional information processing associated with PE by investigating eye movements recorded as an objective and quantitative index of attention allocation
Summary
In the later years of life, various functioning areas in older adults, in specific cognitive domains (e.g., cognitive control, speed of information processing, and memory), decline with age (Beaudreau and O’Hara, 2008). The results have indicated that older adults with higher cognitive control performance tend to display PE (Knight et al, 2007) Once their cognitive resources are occupied by secondary tasks and become relatively scarce (i.e., when they have a working memory load) (Kennedy et al, 2020), their attention will no longer be drawn toward positive stimuli or away from negative stimuli. Others using pupil size as an indicator of cognitive effort have found that older adults make little effort to engage in a positive gaze when experiencing a negative mood (Allard et al, 2010) Their findings are seemingly confounded by the argument that PE is involved in top-down, voluntary cognitive control processes (Henderickx et al, 2009; Reed and Carstensen, 2012; Sakaki et al, 2019). The present study used a real-time eye-tracking technique to disentangle the attentional engagement and disengagement processes involved in age-related positivity effect (PE)
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