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Abstract
Being able to orient our attention to moments in time is crucial for optimizing behavioral performance. In young adults, flexible cue-based temporal expectations have been shown to modulate perceptual functions and enhance behavioral performance. Recent studies with older individuals have reported significant deficits in cued temporal orienting. To investigate the extent of these deficits, the authors conducted 3 studies in healthy old and young adults. For each study, participants completed 2 tasks: a reaction time (RT) task that emphasized speeded responding and a nonspeeded rapid-serial-visual-presentation task that emphasized visual discrimination. Auditory cues indicated the likelihood of a target item occurring after a short or long temporal interval (foreperiod; 75% validity). In the first study, cues indicating a short or a long foreperiod were manipulated across blocks. The second study was designed to replicate and extend the first study by manipulating the predictive temporal cues on a trial-by-trial basis. The third study extended the findings by including neutral cues so that it was possible to separate cueing validity benefits and invalidity costs. In all 3 studies, cued temporal expectation conferred significant performance advantages for target stimuli occurring after the short foreperiod for both old and young participants. Contrary to previous findings, these results suggest that the ability to allocate attention to moments in time can be preserved in healthy aging. Further research is needed to ascertain whether similar neural networks are used to orient attention in time as we age, and/or whether compensatory mechanisms are at work in older individuals.
Highlights
ParticipantsEach experiment consisted of 18 –20 participants in both younger and older groups. Each participant took part in only one experiment, with the exception of 13 older participants who took part in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2
Puzzled by the contrast between the robust temporal orienting effects in older adults in our first study, and the absence of these effects across Zanto et al.’s (2011) three task conditions, we considered whether deficits in updating information about the cue prediction on a trial-by-trial basis could have masked their temporal expectation effects
If age-related differences in temporal expectation exist, it is probably too early to conclude that older adults suffer from a categorical deficit
Summary
Each experiment consisted of 18 –20 participants in both younger and older groups. Each participant took part in only one experiment, with the exception of 13 older participants who took part in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Participants were instructed to maintain central fixation throughout the tasks and to do their best to use the temporal information provided to them by the auditory cues to help them to predict when the target was most likely to appear Both tasks followed the same basic design (see Figure 1). To account for the possibility of unequal trial numbers or power between the trial conditions or groups, we conducted a series of nonparametric permutation tests to analyze the strength of the validity effects for each experiment (Ernst, 2004; Maris, Schoffelen, & Fries, 2007; see Rohenkohl, Gould, Pessoa, & Nobre, 2014) To this end, we performed repeated-measures ANOVAs separately for young and old adults. The permutation p value was determined as the proportion of random partitions that resulted in a larger test statistic than the observed one
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