Psychon Bull Rev (2014) 21:836–842 DOI 10.3758/s13423-013-0554-5
BRIEF REPORT
Aging and response interference across sensory modalities Maria J. S. Guerreiro & Jos J. Adam & Pascal W. M. Van Gerven
Published online: 23 November 2013 # Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2013
Abstract Advancing age is associated with decrements in selective attention. It was recently hypothesized that agerelated differences in selective attention depend on sensory modality. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related vulnerability to distraction, using a response interference task. To this end, 16 younger (mean age = 23.1 years) and 24 older (mean age = 65.3 years) adults performed four response interference tasks, involving all combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors. The results showed that response interference effects differ across sensory modalities, but not across age groups. These results indicate that sensory modality plays an important role in vulnerability to distraction, but not in agerelated distractibility by irrelevant spatial information. Keywords Aging . Distraction . Sensory modality . Response interference
Introduction Aging is associated with decrements in selective attention, as demonstrated by tasks that require attending to relevant information and ignoring concurrent distraction (e.g., Lustig, M. J. S. Guerreiro : P. W. M. Van Gerven Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, P. O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands J. J. Adam Department of Human Movement Sciences, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, P. O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands Present Address: M. J. S. Guerreiro (*) Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 11, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
Hasher, & Tonev, 2001). It has recently been proposed that age-related differences in vulnerability to distraction are modality dependent (Guerreiro, Murphy, & Van Gerven, 2010), such that age-related distractibility is more likely when relevant and irrelevant information are presented in the same sensory modality and when irrelevant information is presented in the visual modality, regardless of the relevant modality. In fact, studies in which both targets and distractors are presented within the same modality have mostly shown age-related distractibility (e.g., Simon task, Pick & Proctor, 1999; Stroop task, Wurm, Labouvie-Vief, Aycock, Rebucal, & Koch, 2004). In contrast, tasks in which targets and distractors are presented in different modalities—and especially crossmodal visual tasks, in which targets are visual and distractors are auditory—have mostly revealed age-equivalent distractibility (e.g., cross-modal Simon task, Simon & Pouraghabagher, 1978; irrelevant speech paradigms, Van Gerven & Murphy, 2010). Finally, the few studies conducted to date using cross-modal auditory tasks—in which targets are auditory and distractors are visual—have shown age-related vulnerability to distraction (Guerreiro, Murphy, & Van Gerven, 2013; Guerreiro & Van Gerven, 2011; but see Einstein, Earles, & Collins, 2002). In order to directly investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related distraction, the modality in which relevant and irrelevant information are presented should be systematically varied within the same experimental design and participant sample. Thus far, however, most studies assessing age-related differences in selective attention involved a combination of targets and distractors in one sensory modality, especially the visual modality. In fact, there are currently only two studies employing all combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors (Guerreiro, Adam, & Van Gerven, 2012; Guerreiro et al., 2013), with one of these studies pointing toward an age-related vulnerability to cross-modal visual distraction (Guerreiro et al., 2013; see also Guerreiro & Van Gerven, 2011; Poliakoff, Ashworth, Lowe, & Spence, 2006) and the other showing age-equivalent automatic
Psychon Bull Rev (2014) 21:836–842
selective attention across sensory modalities (Guerreiro et al., 2012; see also Hugenschmidt, Peiffer, McCoy, Hayasaka, & Laurienti, 2009). The goal of the present study was to cross-validate previous findings of an age-related vulnerability to cross-modal visual distraction (e.g., Guerreiro et al., 2013).To this end, we used a response interference task based on a cross-modal variant of the Simon task, in which participants were required to press a left or right button depending on the identity of centrally or binaurally presented targets, while ignoring the spatial location of visual or auditory distractors. On the basis of the hypothesis that age-related distractibility is modality dependent (Guerreiro et al., 2010), we predicted that older adults would be especially affected by unimodal distraction, as well as by cross-modal visual distraction.
837 Table 1 Means, standard deviations, and t values for group comparisons on background measures Young Adults
Older Adults
t
M
SD
M
Educationa
17.4
2.0
12.7
3.3
5.62**
RSPMb SCWTc Visual acuityd Hearing acuitye
2.4 24.0 0.6 6.3
0.6 4.8 0.1 3.3
2.7 40.9 0.9 27.7
0.8 14.2 0.2 10.3
−1.28 −5.40** −7.65** −7.96**
SD
Note. Negative t vales indicate that the mean of the older participants was higher. RSPM = Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices; SCWT = Stroop Color Word Test. a
Education is presented in years.
b
In the RSPM (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1988), scores range from 1 (superior intellect) to 5 (limited intellect).
c
Method Participants An a priori power analysis using G*Power 3.1 (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) indicated that a sample size of 36 participants would be required to detect a large effect size of the between-groups factor with a power of .80. In contrast, a sample size of 28 participants would be necessary to detect a medium effect size of the within-groups factor and of the within–between factors interaction with a power of .80. Sixteen younger adults (20–29 years of age, M = 23.1, SD = 2.6; 11 women) and 24 older adults (60–75 years of age, M = 65.3, SD = 3.9; 15 women) participated in this study. The younger adults were recruited through advertisements placed on bulletin boards throughout Maastricht University, as well as through an online participant recruitment database. Older adults were recruited by word of mouth, through flyers distributed throughout Maastricht, and through a participant pool of the Maastricht Aging Study (Jolles, Houx, Van Boxtel, & Ponds, 1995). Demographic characteristics are presented in Table 1. Materials and procedure The tasks were programmed in E-Prime (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA) and were presented to participants using a 17-in. computer screen and Sennheiser HD 280 Professional stereo headphones. There were four tasks, reflecting the possible combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors: unimodal visual task, unimodal auditory task, cross-modal visual task, and cross-modal auditory task. The order of the tasks was counterbalanced according to a balanced Latin square (Edwards, 1951). Throughout the tasks, participants were required to press one of two response buttons, depending on the identity of the
In the SCWT (Stroop, 1935), a measure of interference was calculated by subtracting the average time needed to complete the first two cards from the time needed to complete the third card (Interference = Stroop III − [(Stroop I + Stroop II) / 2]) (Van der Elst, Van Boxtel, Van Breukelen, & Jolles, 2006).
d The visual acuity score is the font size of text that can be read without errors in the Dutch reading chart (Medical Workshop, Groningen, The Netherlands), ranging from 0.5 D (optimal) to 1.25 D (poor). e
Hearing acuity is expressed as the average pure-tone thresholds (in decibels) at 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz for the best ear (Davis, 1995), as measured by a screening audiometer (Voyager 522, Madsen Electronics, Taastrup, Denmark). *p < .05 **p < .001
target they saw or heard. Half of the participants pressed the right button whenever they saw an X or heard a high-pitch tone and the left button whenever they saw an O or heard a low-pitch tone, whereas the other half received the opposite instructions. Each of these targets was presented with concurrent distractors in the same or the opposite sensory modality, which could be congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to the side of the response required by the target: clicks that could be presented to the left ear, right ear, or both ears; or asterisks that could be presented on the right side, left side, or both sides of the screen (Fig. 1). Visual targets (i.e., the letters X and O) were presented in the center of the screen and subtended a visual angle of 2°. Visual distractors (i.e., the symbol *) were centered 11° from the visual targets and subtended a visual angle of 1°. Auditory targets consisted of 15-ms binaural high- and low-pitch tones, whereas auditory distractors consisted of 15-ms monaural or binaural clicks, at a sampling rate of 11 kHz and presented at 75 dB(A). Each of the four tasks comprised 40 congruent trials, 40 incongruent trials, and 40 neutral trials. The order of the trials was randomized across participants. Within each trial, participants had 2,000 ms to respond. This was followed by an
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Psychon Bull Rev (2014) 21:836–842
Fig. 1 Experimental design of the unimodal visual task (top panel), unimodal auditory task (middle upper panel), cross-modal visual task (middle lower panel), and cross-modal auditory task (bottom panel) with congruent trials (left side), neutral trials (center), and incongruent trials (right side). Targets were centrally presented stimuli (i.e., X and O for
visual targets, high-pitched and low-pitched tones) requiring right and left responses, whereas distractors were spatial accessory stimuli (i.e., asterisks and clicks) that could be presented on the right side, left side, or both sides. In the examples depicted in this figure, participants were required to press a right button for X and high-pitched tones
intertrial interval of 1,000 ms, during which a fixation cross was presented at the center of the screen. The next trial began immediately afterward. Prior to these tasks, participants performed a practice block for the visual targets (i.e., X and O) and a practice block for the auditory targets (i.e., high- and low-pitch tones), during which no distractors were presented. The goal of these practice blocks was for participants to learn the target– response associations. There were 20 trials in each of these practice blocks. The order of the trials was randomized across participants. Participants were given accuracy feedback after each trial. To ensure that participants would not just close their eyes during the cross-modal auditory task, gaze position was recorded with an eyetracker (EyeLink 1000; SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada). Eye movements were recorded at a 1000-Hz sampling rate with an accuracy of 0.5° visual angle. An interest area of 27° × 12° was defined at the center of the display, within which the targets and distractors were presented. The percentage of dwell time spent in this interest area was then calculated with the EyeLink Data Viewer software (SR Research Ltd.).
Results
Design Age group (younger, older) was the independent betweengroups variable. Target modality (visual, auditory), distractor modality (visual, auditory), and congruency (congruent, incongruent, neutral) were the independent withingroups variables. Dependent variables were reaction time (in milliseconds) and errors (in percentages of incorrect responses).
Trials with reaction times that were more than 2.5 standard deviations longer or shorter than the mean for each participant in each of the tasks, as well as trials with incorrect or missed responses, were removed from the analysis. The number of trials excluded for these reasons did not differ between younger (M = 5.5 %, SD = 3.4) and older (M = 5.9 %, SD = 3.8) adults, t(38) = 0.45, p = .656. Because error rates and misses were very low, they are not discussed further. In order to investigate age-related differences in vulnerability to distraction as a function of sensory modality, we computed interference effects for each participant in each task as the difference in mean reaction times between incongruent and congruent trials (i.e., difference scores). In order to take possible effects of generalized age-related slowing into account, we also calculated interference effects as the difference in mean reaction times between incongruent and congruent trials, divided by the mean reaction times in neutral conditions (i.e., ratio scores). The ratio scores are reported only if they differ from the results of the difference scores. Interference effects were analyzed with a 2 (age group) × 2 (target modality) × 2 (distractor modality) mixed analysis of variance. The alpha level was set to .05. Effect sizes are reported as eta-squared (η 2). Post hoc tests were subsequently performed to test the presence of interference effects in each sensory modality, as well as differences in the magnitude of interference effects across sensory modality combinations. Response interference effects There was no effect of age group, F(1, 38) = 0.03, p = .864, η 2 = .00, so response interference effects were equivalent for younger (M = 31 ms, SD = 30) and older (M = 30 ms, SD = 47) adults.
Psychon Bull Rev (2014) 21:836–842
There was a main effect of target modality, F (1, 38) = 13.57, p = .001, η 2 = .26, indicating that response interference was larger with auditory targets (M = 42 ms, SD = 48) than with visual targets (M = 18 ms, SD = 36). Age group did not interact with this effect, F (1, 38) = 0.19, p = .663, η 2 = .00. There was no effect of distractor modality, F (1, 38) = 0.02, p = .905, η 2 = .00, as well as no interaction between distractor modality and age group, F (1, 38) = 0.97, p = .332, η 2 = .02, suggesting that response interference did not differ between auditory distractors (M = 31 ms, SD = 41) and visual distractors (M = 29 ms, SD = 48) in either age group. There was, however, a target modality × distractor modality interaction, F (1, 38) = 20.32, p < .001, η 2 = .35, indicating that response interference effects differed as a function of sensory modality combination (Fig. 2). Age group did not interact with this effect, F(1, 38) = 0.00, p = .964, η 2 = .00, suggesting that the differences in response interference across sensory modalities were equivalent for the two age groups. For this reason, in the following, we analyze response interference effects separately by sensory modality combination, but collapsed across age groups. Post hoc t -tests were first performed to determine the presence of interference effects. Response interference effects were significantly different from zero in the unimodal auditory task, t(39) = 3.90, p < .001, in the cross-modal auditory task, t(39) = 7.45, p < .001, and in the cross-modal visual task, t(39) = 6.17, p < .001, but not in the unimodal visual task, t(39) = 0.52, p = .609. These results indicate that response interference effects were present in all tasks, except in the unimodal visual task. Paired samples t-tests with Bonferroni correction were subsequently performed to compare the magnitude of interference effects across the sensory modality combinations in which there was significant response interference. Response interference effects were significantly larger in the cross-modal auditory task than in the unimodal auditory task, t(39) = 2.67, p = .033, and there was a trend for them to be larger in the crossmodal auditory task than in the cross-modal visual task, t(39) =
839
2.42, p = .061. With ratio scores, the latter trend became significant, t (39) = 2.70, p = .030. Response interference effects were equivalent between the unimodal auditory task and the cross-modal visual task, t(39) = 0.60, p = 1.000. Dwell time in the cross-modal auditory task Gaze position was recorded to ensure that participants kept their gaze within an interest area in which visual distractors were presented during the cross-modal auditory task. The eyetracker data of two young adults and five older adults could not be used due to extreme loss of signal (e.g., hard contact lenses, sleepiness, make-up), and the eyetracker data of one older adult were lost. Dwell times differed across age groups, t(18.6) = 2.85, p = .010, such that older adults maintained their gaze in the interest area for a lower proportion of time (M = 79.7 %, SD = 28.6) than did younger adults (M = 98.5 %, SD = 3.1). Most important, dwell times were rather high (i.e., on average, above 80 %), showing that for the most part, participants kept their gaze in the interest area. Correlations between sensory acuity and response interference In the present study, older adults had lower visual and auditory acuity than did younger adults. To exclude the possibility that age-related sensory acuity reductions could account for the absence of age-related differences in vulnerability to interference, we calculated Pearson correlations between hearing thresholds and (unimodal and cross-modal) auditory interference, as well as between visual thresholds and (unimodal and cross-modal) visual interference. Visual acuity did not correlate with unimodal visual interference, r = .13, p = .424, or with cross-modal visual interference, r = −.06, p = .736. Likewise, hearing acuity did not correlate with unimodal auditory interference, r = .11, p = .503, or with cross-modal auditory interference, r = .27, p = .099.
Fig. 2 Mean reaction times and standard errors as a function of congruency and mean interference effects (reaction time on incongruent trials minus reaction time on congruent trials), separately for each task
840
Discussion The goal of this study was to further investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related vulnerability to distraction. To this end, we used a response interference task based on a cross-modal variant of the Simon task (Simon & Pouraghabagher, 1978), in which participants attended to visual or auditory targets, while ignoring irrelevant spatial information conveyed by visual or auditory distractors. On the basis of the hypothesis that age-related differences in distractibility are modality dependent (Guerreiro et al., 2010), we predicted that older adults would be especially affected by unimodal distraction and by cross-modal visual distraction, but not by cross-modal auditory distraction. We did not find evidence for interference effects in the unimodal visual task in either age group. Although somewhat surprising—in that most studies yielding evidence for agerelated distractibility were actually conducted in the visual modality (e.g., Simon task, Castel, Balota, Hutchison, Logan, & Yap, 2007; Stroop task, Spieler, Balota, & Faust, 1996)—this result is in line with reports of age-equivalent Simon effects when the irrelevant information is conveyed by accessory stimuli (Proctor, Pick, Vu, & Anderson, 2005), as well as with reports of age-equivalent flanker effects (e.g., Wild-Wall, Falkenstein, & Hohnsbein, 2008). In the present study, we deliberately opted for presenting irrelevant information as distinct stimuli to enable a fully crossed design with comparable tasks across all sensory modality combinations. In contrast to the results of the unimodal visual task, we did find evidence for interference effects in the auditory modality and across the visual and auditory modalities, even though the irrelevant information was likewise conveyed by accessory stimuli. Furthermore, the magnitude of interference effects differed across sensory modalities: Interference was largest in the cross-modal auditory task, whereas it did not differ between the cross-modal visual task and the unimodal auditory task. The present differences in response interference across sensory modalities are consistent with previous studies showing an asymmetry in cross-modal interference, whereby cross-modal visual interference is larger than cross-modal auditory interference (e.g., Lukas, Phillip, & Koch, 2010), and support claims of visual dominance (Posner, Nissen, & Klein, 1976) in the context of cross-modal selective attention. This pattern of differential interference as a function of sensory modality suggests that selective attention operates differently across sensory modalities. For example, at the level of visual selective attention, a push–pull mechanism has been proposed, whereby increases in target-related processing are associated with decreases in distractor-related processing (Pinsk, Doniger, & Kastner, 2004). If such a mechanism successfully precluded distractibility by irrelevant visual information during visual attention in the unimodal visual task, then it is conceivable that this mechanism is restricted to
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conditions in which both targets and distractors are presented in the visual modality. Most important, interference effects in the unimodal auditory task and in both cross-modal tasks were age equivalent. The result of an age-equivalent vulnerability to unimodal auditory distraction contrasts with findings of age-related unimodal auditory distractibility in Simon (Pick & Proctor, 1999) and Stroop (Wurm et al., 2004) tasks and suggests that presenting irrelevant information as an accessory stimulus effectively abolishes age-related distractibility also within the auditory modality (cf. Proctor et al., 2005). Our results are, however, in line with those of previous studies employing cross-modal Simon tasks (Proctor et al., 2005; Simon & Pouraghabagher, 1978), on the basis of which we modeled our task. Worth noting, although cross-modal interference effects were age equivalent, the eyetracker data in the crossmodal auditory task point toward an age-related difference in vulnerability to cross-modal visual distraction: Whereas younger adults kept their gaze in the visual display throughout the task, older adults seemed to have some difficulty with this, as is suggested by their lower dwell times relative to younger adults. The lower dwell times of older adults in this task cannot, however, account for the absence of age-related differences in cross-modal visual distraction, because an additional analysis that excluded those participants who kept their gaze within the interest area for less than 75 % of the time (i.e., 5 older participants) entirely replicated the present pattern of results. An alternative explanation for the absence of agerelated interference effects could be the lower sensory acuity of older adults, as compared with younger adults. Contrary to this possibility, however, visual acuity did not correlate with unimodal or cross-modal visual interference, nor did hearing acuity correlate with unimodal or cross-modal auditory interference. Overall, the present results do not support the hypothesis of modality-dependent age-related distractibility (Guerreiro et al., 2010). We had previously argued that modalitydependent age-related differences in selective attention might not be observed in automatic attention (i.e., exogenous spatial cuing tasks; Guerreiro et al., 2012), but only in controlled types of attention (i.e., n-back tasks; Guerreiro et al., 2013; Guerreiro & Van Gerven, 2011), in line with the claim that age-related differences are observed in controlled, but not in automatic, processing (Hasher & Zacks, 1979). However, to the extent that the present tasks require controlled processing—as is suggested by the recruitment of prefrontal cortex structures by younger and older adults in interference resolution in Simon (Onur, Piefke, Lie, Thiel, & Fink, 2012) and flanker (e.g., Zhu, Zacks, & Slade, 2010) tasks—an alternative account would be that modality-dependent age-related differences in distractibility are not found in tasks in which distraction is elicited by spatial location (cf. Guerreiro et al., 2012). This possibility is consistent with the claim of spared
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spatial attention in old age (e.g., Adam et al., 1998; Hartley, 1993) and with findings of age-equivalent performance in spatial variants of tasks in which age-related differences are usually found. For example, age-related differences in negative priming are predominantly observed in identity negative priming tasks, but not in spatial negative priming tasks (e.g., Connelly & Hasher, 1993). Likewise, age-related differences are found in the typical Stroop task, but not in spatial variants of this task (e.g., Hartley, 1993). To the extent that spatial attention is involved in the response interference task used in the present study, our results suggest that the age equivalence of visual spatial attention (e.g., Hartley, 1993) extends to the auditory modality, as well as to crossmodal attention. One limitation of the present study is the lack of a sample of older old adults. We included only a single sample of older adults, who were relatively young (60–75 years). This does not seem to explain the absence of age-related differences in response interference, however, because an additional analysis in which we compared the youngest eight young adults (M = 21.1 years, SD = 0.8) with the oldest eight older adults (M = 69.9 years, SD = 2.4) entirely replicated the age equivalence of response interference across sensory modalities, F (1, 14) = 0.00, p = .991, η 2 = .00. Another limitation of the present study is the uncertainty as to how comparable the distractors are across sensory modalities. For example, spatial interference (by lateralized clicks or asterisks) could have been larger with the processing of (lowand high-pitched) tones because of potential dimensional overlap between pitch and space (e.g., Cho & Proctor, 2003; Proctor & Cho, 2006) than with the processing of letters (X and O), for which there is arguably no dimensional overlap with space. Importantly, although we found an effect of target modality, such that spatial inference was indeed larger for auditory than for visual targets, an additional analysis with response side as a between-groups factor showed no interaction between target modality and response side on interference effects, F(1, 38) = 0.28, p = .600, η 2 = .01, which would have been expected if low- and high-pitched tones were differently associated with spatial locations. In summary, the present study shows that response interference effects differ across sensory modalities, but not across age groups. These results indicate that sensory modality plays an important role in vulnerability to distraction, but not in agerelated distractibility by irrelevant spatial information.
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BRIEF REPORT
Aging and response interference across sensory modalities Maria J. S. Guerreiro & Jos J. Adam & Pascal W. M. Van Gerven
Published online: 23 November 2013 # Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2013
Abstract Advancing age is associated with decrements in selective attention. It was recently hypothesized that agerelated differences in selective attention depend on sensory modality. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related vulnerability to distraction, using a response interference task. To this end, 16 younger (mean age = 23.1 years) and 24 older (mean age = 65.3 years) adults performed four response interference tasks, involving all combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors. The results showed that response interference effects differ across sensory modalities, but not across age groups. These results indicate that sensory modality plays an important role in vulnerability to distraction, but not in agerelated distractibility by irrelevant spatial information. Keywords Aging . Distraction . Sensory modality . Response interference
Introduction Aging is associated with decrements in selective attention, as demonstrated by tasks that require attending to relevant information and ignoring concurrent distraction (e.g., Lustig, M. J. S. Guerreiro : P. W. M. Van Gerven Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, P. O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands J. J. Adam Department of Human Movement Sciences, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, P. O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands Present Address: M. J. S. Guerreiro (*) Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 11, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
Hasher, & Tonev, 2001). It has recently been proposed that age-related differences in vulnerability to distraction are modality dependent (Guerreiro, Murphy, & Van Gerven, 2010), such that age-related distractibility is more likely when relevant and irrelevant information are presented in the same sensory modality and when irrelevant information is presented in the visual modality, regardless of the relevant modality. In fact, studies in which both targets and distractors are presented within the same modality have mostly shown age-related distractibility (e.g., Simon task, Pick & Proctor, 1999; Stroop task, Wurm, Labouvie-Vief, Aycock, Rebucal, & Koch, 2004). In contrast, tasks in which targets and distractors are presented in different modalities—and especially crossmodal visual tasks, in which targets are visual and distractors are auditory—have mostly revealed age-equivalent distractibility (e.g., cross-modal Simon task, Simon & Pouraghabagher, 1978; irrelevant speech paradigms, Van Gerven & Murphy, 2010). Finally, the few studies conducted to date using cross-modal auditory tasks—in which targets are auditory and distractors are visual—have shown age-related vulnerability to distraction (Guerreiro, Murphy, & Van Gerven, 2013; Guerreiro & Van Gerven, 2011; but see Einstein, Earles, & Collins, 2002). In order to directly investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related distraction, the modality in which relevant and irrelevant information are presented should be systematically varied within the same experimental design and participant sample. Thus far, however, most studies assessing age-related differences in selective attention involved a combination of targets and distractors in one sensory modality, especially the visual modality. In fact, there are currently only two studies employing all combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors (Guerreiro, Adam, & Van Gerven, 2012; Guerreiro et al., 2013), with one of these studies pointing toward an age-related vulnerability to cross-modal visual distraction (Guerreiro et al., 2013; see also Guerreiro & Van Gerven, 2011; Poliakoff, Ashworth, Lowe, & Spence, 2006) and the other showing age-equivalent automatic
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selective attention across sensory modalities (Guerreiro et al., 2012; see also Hugenschmidt, Peiffer, McCoy, Hayasaka, & Laurienti, 2009). The goal of the present study was to cross-validate previous findings of an age-related vulnerability to cross-modal visual distraction (e.g., Guerreiro et al., 2013).To this end, we used a response interference task based on a cross-modal variant of the Simon task, in which participants were required to press a left or right button depending on the identity of centrally or binaurally presented targets, while ignoring the spatial location of visual or auditory distractors. On the basis of the hypothesis that age-related distractibility is modality dependent (Guerreiro et al., 2010), we predicted that older adults would be especially affected by unimodal distraction, as well as by cross-modal visual distraction.
837 Table 1 Means, standard deviations, and t values for group comparisons on background measures Young Adults
Older Adults
t
M
SD
M
Educationa
17.4
2.0
12.7
3.3
5.62**
RSPMb SCWTc Visual acuityd Hearing acuitye
2.4 24.0 0.6 6.3
0.6 4.8 0.1 3.3
2.7 40.9 0.9 27.7
0.8 14.2 0.2 10.3
−1.28 −5.40** −7.65** −7.96**
SD
Note. Negative t vales indicate that the mean of the older participants was higher. RSPM = Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices; SCWT = Stroop Color Word Test. a
Education is presented in years.
b
In the RSPM (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1988), scores range from 1 (superior intellect) to 5 (limited intellect).
c
Method Participants An a priori power analysis using G*Power 3.1 (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) indicated that a sample size of 36 participants would be required to detect a large effect size of the between-groups factor with a power of .80. In contrast, a sample size of 28 participants would be necessary to detect a medium effect size of the within-groups factor and of the within–between factors interaction with a power of .80. Sixteen younger adults (20–29 years of age, M = 23.1, SD = 2.6; 11 women) and 24 older adults (60–75 years of age, M = 65.3, SD = 3.9; 15 women) participated in this study. The younger adults were recruited through advertisements placed on bulletin boards throughout Maastricht University, as well as through an online participant recruitment database. Older adults were recruited by word of mouth, through flyers distributed throughout Maastricht, and through a participant pool of the Maastricht Aging Study (Jolles, Houx, Van Boxtel, & Ponds, 1995). Demographic characteristics are presented in Table 1. Materials and procedure The tasks were programmed in E-Prime (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA) and were presented to participants using a 17-in. computer screen and Sennheiser HD 280 Professional stereo headphones. There were four tasks, reflecting the possible combinations of visual and auditory targets and distractors: unimodal visual task, unimodal auditory task, cross-modal visual task, and cross-modal auditory task. The order of the tasks was counterbalanced according to a balanced Latin square (Edwards, 1951). Throughout the tasks, participants were required to press one of two response buttons, depending on the identity of the
In the SCWT (Stroop, 1935), a measure of interference was calculated by subtracting the average time needed to complete the first two cards from the time needed to complete the third card (Interference = Stroop III − [(Stroop I + Stroop II) / 2]) (Van der Elst, Van Boxtel, Van Breukelen, & Jolles, 2006).
d The visual acuity score is the font size of text that can be read without errors in the Dutch reading chart (Medical Workshop, Groningen, The Netherlands), ranging from 0.5 D (optimal) to 1.25 D (poor). e
Hearing acuity is expressed as the average pure-tone thresholds (in decibels) at 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz for the best ear (Davis, 1995), as measured by a screening audiometer (Voyager 522, Madsen Electronics, Taastrup, Denmark). *p < .05 **p < .001
target they saw or heard. Half of the participants pressed the right button whenever they saw an X or heard a high-pitch tone and the left button whenever they saw an O or heard a low-pitch tone, whereas the other half received the opposite instructions. Each of these targets was presented with concurrent distractors in the same or the opposite sensory modality, which could be congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to the side of the response required by the target: clicks that could be presented to the left ear, right ear, or both ears; or asterisks that could be presented on the right side, left side, or both sides of the screen (Fig. 1). Visual targets (i.e., the letters X and O) were presented in the center of the screen and subtended a visual angle of 2°. Visual distractors (i.e., the symbol *) were centered 11° from the visual targets and subtended a visual angle of 1°. Auditory targets consisted of 15-ms binaural high- and low-pitch tones, whereas auditory distractors consisted of 15-ms monaural or binaural clicks, at a sampling rate of 11 kHz and presented at 75 dB(A). Each of the four tasks comprised 40 congruent trials, 40 incongruent trials, and 40 neutral trials. The order of the trials was randomized across participants. Within each trial, participants had 2,000 ms to respond. This was followed by an
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Fig. 1 Experimental design of the unimodal visual task (top panel), unimodal auditory task (middle upper panel), cross-modal visual task (middle lower panel), and cross-modal auditory task (bottom panel) with congruent trials (left side), neutral trials (center), and incongruent trials (right side). Targets were centrally presented stimuli (i.e., X and O for
visual targets, high-pitched and low-pitched tones) requiring right and left responses, whereas distractors were spatial accessory stimuli (i.e., asterisks and clicks) that could be presented on the right side, left side, or both sides. In the examples depicted in this figure, participants were required to press a right button for X and high-pitched tones
intertrial interval of 1,000 ms, during which a fixation cross was presented at the center of the screen. The next trial began immediately afterward. Prior to these tasks, participants performed a practice block for the visual targets (i.e., X and O) and a practice block for the auditory targets (i.e., high- and low-pitch tones), during which no distractors were presented. The goal of these practice blocks was for participants to learn the target– response associations. There were 20 trials in each of these practice blocks. The order of the trials was randomized across participants. Participants were given accuracy feedback after each trial. To ensure that participants would not just close their eyes during the cross-modal auditory task, gaze position was recorded with an eyetracker (EyeLink 1000; SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada). Eye movements were recorded at a 1000-Hz sampling rate with an accuracy of 0.5° visual angle. An interest area of 27° × 12° was defined at the center of the display, within which the targets and distractors were presented. The percentage of dwell time spent in this interest area was then calculated with the EyeLink Data Viewer software (SR Research Ltd.).
Results
Design Age group (younger, older) was the independent betweengroups variable. Target modality (visual, auditory), distractor modality (visual, auditory), and congruency (congruent, incongruent, neutral) were the independent withingroups variables. Dependent variables were reaction time (in milliseconds) and errors (in percentages of incorrect responses).
Trials with reaction times that were more than 2.5 standard deviations longer or shorter than the mean for each participant in each of the tasks, as well as trials with incorrect or missed responses, were removed from the analysis. The number of trials excluded for these reasons did not differ between younger (M = 5.5 %, SD = 3.4) and older (M = 5.9 %, SD = 3.8) adults, t(38) = 0.45, p = .656. Because error rates and misses were very low, they are not discussed further. In order to investigate age-related differences in vulnerability to distraction as a function of sensory modality, we computed interference effects for each participant in each task as the difference in mean reaction times between incongruent and congruent trials (i.e., difference scores). In order to take possible effects of generalized age-related slowing into account, we also calculated interference effects as the difference in mean reaction times between incongruent and congruent trials, divided by the mean reaction times in neutral conditions (i.e., ratio scores). The ratio scores are reported only if they differ from the results of the difference scores. Interference effects were analyzed with a 2 (age group) × 2 (target modality) × 2 (distractor modality) mixed analysis of variance. The alpha level was set to .05. Effect sizes are reported as eta-squared (η 2). Post hoc tests were subsequently performed to test the presence of interference effects in each sensory modality, as well as differences in the magnitude of interference effects across sensory modality combinations. Response interference effects There was no effect of age group, F(1, 38) = 0.03, p = .864, η 2 = .00, so response interference effects were equivalent for younger (M = 31 ms, SD = 30) and older (M = 30 ms, SD = 47) adults.
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There was a main effect of target modality, F (1, 38) = 13.57, p = .001, η 2 = .26, indicating that response interference was larger with auditory targets (M = 42 ms, SD = 48) than with visual targets (M = 18 ms, SD = 36). Age group did not interact with this effect, F (1, 38) = 0.19, p = .663, η 2 = .00. There was no effect of distractor modality, F (1, 38) = 0.02, p = .905, η 2 = .00, as well as no interaction between distractor modality and age group, F (1, 38) = 0.97, p = .332, η 2 = .02, suggesting that response interference did not differ between auditory distractors (M = 31 ms, SD = 41) and visual distractors (M = 29 ms, SD = 48) in either age group. There was, however, a target modality × distractor modality interaction, F (1, 38) = 20.32, p < .001, η 2 = .35, indicating that response interference effects differed as a function of sensory modality combination (Fig. 2). Age group did not interact with this effect, F(1, 38) = 0.00, p = .964, η 2 = .00, suggesting that the differences in response interference across sensory modalities were equivalent for the two age groups. For this reason, in the following, we analyze response interference effects separately by sensory modality combination, but collapsed across age groups. Post hoc t -tests were first performed to determine the presence of interference effects. Response interference effects were significantly different from zero in the unimodal auditory task, t(39) = 3.90, p < .001, in the cross-modal auditory task, t(39) = 7.45, p < .001, and in the cross-modal visual task, t(39) = 6.17, p < .001, but not in the unimodal visual task, t(39) = 0.52, p = .609. These results indicate that response interference effects were present in all tasks, except in the unimodal visual task. Paired samples t-tests with Bonferroni correction were subsequently performed to compare the magnitude of interference effects across the sensory modality combinations in which there was significant response interference. Response interference effects were significantly larger in the cross-modal auditory task than in the unimodal auditory task, t(39) = 2.67, p = .033, and there was a trend for them to be larger in the crossmodal auditory task than in the cross-modal visual task, t(39) =
839
2.42, p = .061. With ratio scores, the latter trend became significant, t (39) = 2.70, p = .030. Response interference effects were equivalent between the unimodal auditory task and the cross-modal visual task, t(39) = 0.60, p = 1.000. Dwell time in the cross-modal auditory task Gaze position was recorded to ensure that participants kept their gaze within an interest area in which visual distractors were presented during the cross-modal auditory task. The eyetracker data of two young adults and five older adults could not be used due to extreme loss of signal (e.g., hard contact lenses, sleepiness, make-up), and the eyetracker data of one older adult were lost. Dwell times differed across age groups, t(18.6) = 2.85, p = .010, such that older adults maintained their gaze in the interest area for a lower proportion of time (M = 79.7 %, SD = 28.6) than did younger adults (M = 98.5 %, SD = 3.1). Most important, dwell times were rather high (i.e., on average, above 80 %), showing that for the most part, participants kept their gaze in the interest area. Correlations between sensory acuity and response interference In the present study, older adults had lower visual and auditory acuity than did younger adults. To exclude the possibility that age-related sensory acuity reductions could account for the absence of age-related differences in vulnerability to interference, we calculated Pearson correlations between hearing thresholds and (unimodal and cross-modal) auditory interference, as well as between visual thresholds and (unimodal and cross-modal) visual interference. Visual acuity did not correlate with unimodal visual interference, r = .13, p = .424, or with cross-modal visual interference, r = −.06, p = .736. Likewise, hearing acuity did not correlate with unimodal auditory interference, r = .11, p = .503, or with cross-modal auditory interference, r = .27, p = .099.
Fig. 2 Mean reaction times and standard errors as a function of congruency and mean interference effects (reaction time on incongruent trials minus reaction time on congruent trials), separately for each task
840
Discussion The goal of this study was to further investigate the role of sensory modality in age-related vulnerability to distraction. To this end, we used a response interference task based on a cross-modal variant of the Simon task (Simon & Pouraghabagher, 1978), in which participants attended to visual or auditory targets, while ignoring irrelevant spatial information conveyed by visual or auditory distractors. On the basis of the hypothesis that age-related differences in distractibility are modality dependent (Guerreiro et al., 2010), we predicted that older adults would be especially affected by unimodal distraction and by cross-modal visual distraction, but not by cross-modal auditory distraction. We did not find evidence for interference effects in the unimodal visual task in either age group. Although somewhat surprising—in that most studies yielding evidence for agerelated distractibility were actually conducted in the visual modality (e.g., Simon task, Castel, Balota, Hutchison, Logan, & Yap, 2007; Stroop task, Spieler, Balota, & Faust, 1996)—this result is in line with reports of age-equivalent Simon effects when the irrelevant information is conveyed by accessory stimuli (Proctor, Pick, Vu, & Anderson, 2005), as well as with reports of age-equivalent flanker effects (e.g., Wild-Wall, Falkenstein, & Hohnsbein, 2008). In the present study, we deliberately opted for presenting irrelevant information as distinct stimuli to enable a fully crossed design with comparable tasks across all sensory modality combinations. In contrast to the results of the unimodal visual task, we did find evidence for interference effects in the auditory modality and across the visual and auditory modalities, even though the irrelevant information was likewise conveyed by accessory stimuli. Furthermore, the magnitude of interference effects differed across sensory modalities: Interference was largest in the cross-modal auditory task, whereas it did not differ between the cross-modal visual task and the unimodal auditory task. The present differences in response interference across sensory modalities are consistent with previous studies showing an asymmetry in cross-modal interference, whereby cross-modal visual interference is larger than cross-modal auditory interference (e.g., Lukas, Phillip, & Koch, 2010), and support claims of visual dominance (Posner, Nissen, & Klein, 1976) in the context of cross-modal selective attention. This pattern of differential interference as a function of sensory modality suggests that selective attention operates differently across sensory modalities. For example, at the level of visual selective attention, a push–pull mechanism has been proposed, whereby increases in target-related processing are associated with decreases in distractor-related processing (Pinsk, Doniger, & Kastner, 2004). If such a mechanism successfully precluded distractibility by irrelevant visual information during visual attention in the unimodal visual task, then it is conceivable that this mechanism is restricted to
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conditions in which both targets and distractors are presented in the visual modality. Most important, interference effects in the unimodal auditory task and in both cross-modal tasks were age equivalent. The result of an age-equivalent vulnerability to unimodal auditory distraction contrasts with findings of age-related unimodal auditory distractibility in Simon (Pick & Proctor, 1999) and Stroop (Wurm et al., 2004) tasks and suggests that presenting irrelevant information as an accessory stimulus effectively abolishes age-related distractibility also within the auditory modality (cf. Proctor et al., 2005). Our results are, however, in line with those of previous studies employing cross-modal Simon tasks (Proctor et al., 2005; Simon & Pouraghabagher, 1978), on the basis of which we modeled our task. Worth noting, although cross-modal interference effects were age equivalent, the eyetracker data in the crossmodal auditory task point toward an age-related difference in vulnerability to cross-modal visual distraction: Whereas younger adults kept their gaze in the visual display throughout the task, older adults seemed to have some difficulty with this, as is suggested by their lower dwell times relative to younger adults. The lower dwell times of older adults in this task cannot, however, account for the absence of age-related differences in cross-modal visual distraction, because an additional analysis that excluded those participants who kept their gaze within the interest area for less than 75 % of the time (i.e., 5 older participants) entirely replicated the present pattern of results. An alternative explanation for the absence of agerelated interference effects could be the lower sensory acuity of older adults, as compared with younger adults. Contrary to this possibility, however, visual acuity did not correlate with unimodal or cross-modal visual interference, nor did hearing acuity correlate with unimodal or cross-modal auditory interference. Overall, the present results do not support the hypothesis of modality-dependent age-related distractibility (Guerreiro et al., 2010). We had previously argued that modalitydependent age-related differences in selective attention might not be observed in automatic attention (i.e., exogenous spatial cuing tasks; Guerreiro et al., 2012), but only in controlled types of attention (i.e., n-back tasks; Guerreiro et al., 2013; Guerreiro & Van Gerven, 2011), in line with the claim that age-related differences are observed in controlled, but not in automatic, processing (Hasher & Zacks, 1979). However, to the extent that the present tasks require controlled processing—as is suggested by the recruitment of prefrontal cortex structures by younger and older adults in interference resolution in Simon (Onur, Piefke, Lie, Thiel, & Fink, 2012) and flanker (e.g., Zhu, Zacks, & Slade, 2010) tasks—an alternative account would be that modality-dependent age-related differences in distractibility are not found in tasks in which distraction is elicited by spatial location (cf. Guerreiro et al., 2012). This possibility is consistent with the claim of spared
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spatial attention in old age (e.g., Adam et al., 1998; Hartley, 1993) and with findings of age-equivalent performance in spatial variants of tasks in which age-related differences are usually found. For example, age-related differences in negative priming are predominantly observed in identity negative priming tasks, but not in spatial negative priming tasks (e.g., Connelly & Hasher, 1993). Likewise, age-related differences are found in the typical Stroop task, but not in spatial variants of this task (e.g., Hartley, 1993). To the extent that spatial attention is involved in the response interference task used in the present study, our results suggest that the age equivalence of visual spatial attention (e.g., Hartley, 1993) extends to the auditory modality, as well as to crossmodal attention. One limitation of the present study is the lack of a sample of older old adults. We included only a single sample of older adults, who were relatively young (60–75 years). This does not seem to explain the absence of age-related differences in response interference, however, because an additional analysis in which we compared the youngest eight young adults (M = 21.1 years, SD = 0.8) with the oldest eight older adults (M = 69.9 years, SD = 2.4) entirely replicated the age equivalence of response interference across sensory modalities, F (1, 14) = 0.00, p = .991, η 2 = .00. Another limitation of the present study is the uncertainty as to how comparable the distractors are across sensory modalities. For example, spatial interference (by lateralized clicks or asterisks) could have been larger with the processing of (lowand high-pitched) tones because of potential dimensional overlap between pitch and space (e.g., Cho & Proctor, 2003; Proctor & Cho, 2006) than with the processing of letters (X and O), for which there is arguably no dimensional overlap with space. Importantly, although we found an effect of target modality, such that spatial inference was indeed larger for auditory than for visual targets, an additional analysis with response side as a between-groups factor showed no interaction between target modality and response side on interference effects, F(1, 38) = 0.28, p = .600, η 2 = .01, which would have been expected if low- and high-pitched tones were differently associated with spatial locations. In summary, the present study shows that response interference effects differ across sensory modalities, but not across age groups. These results indicate that sensory modality plays an important role in vulnerability to distraction, but not in agerelated distractibility by irrelevant spatial information.
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