Selective control of attention supports the positivity effect in aging.

Laura K Sasse,Matthias Gamer,Christian Büchel,Stefanie Brassen,Jan De Fockert

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104180

Laura K Sasse, Matthias Gamer + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0104180

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Abstract

There is emerging evidence for a positivity effect in healthy aging, which describes an age-specific increased focus on positive compared to negative information. Life-span researchers have attributed this effect to the selective allocation of cognitive resources in the service of prioritized emotional goals. We explored the basic principles of this assumption by assessing selective attention and memory for visual stimuli, differing in emotional content and self-relevance, in young and old participants. To specifically address the impact of cognitive control, voluntary attentional selection during the presentation of multiple-item displays was analyzed and linked to participants' general ability of cognitive control. Results revealed a positivity effect in older adults' selective attention and memory, which was particularly pronounced for self-relevant stimuli. Focusing on positive and ignoring negative information was most evident in older participants with a generally higher ability to exert top-down control during visual search. Our findings highlight the role of controlled selectivity in the occurrence of a positivity effect in aging. Since the effect has been related to well-being in later life, we suggest that the ability to selectively allocate top-down control might represent a resilience factor for emotional health in aging.

Highlights

Over the past 10 years, a great amount of studies has been dedicated to explore the phenomenon of a positivity effect (PE) in older adults’ information processing [1]
Our study could demonstrate that older adults engage in selective attention to produce an age-specific positivity effect (PE) in attention
One of the main hypotheses we tested was that the PE results from an age-related increased emphasis on selective attention as a tool to control emotional information processing

Summary

Introduction

Over the past 10 years, a great amount of studies has been dedicated to explore the phenomenon of a positivity effect (PE) in older adults’ information processing [1]. Older versus younger participants were found to be less distracted when responding to a dot target appearing after a negative relative to a neutral item [3,4,5] and to attend relatively more on positive [6,7,8] and less on negative items [9,10]. Some studies demonstrated that in relation to their overall memory performance, elderly people recall a larger proportion of positive items and a lower proportion of negative items than younger adults [11,12]. It could be demonstrated that the occurrence of the PE depends on the degree of natural information processing permitted by the paradigm and substantially relies on cognitive resources (for reviews see [1,2])

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