How aging affects how we ignore visual locations and objects
While older adults struggle to ignore recently visited moving objects, they can ignore stationary objects just as well as younger adults when given enough time.
Source
Aging and Inhibition of Return to Locations and Objects
What they did
Researchers conducted two experiments using visual search tasks to measure how young and older adults shift attention away from recently cued locations and objects. In Experiment 1, 35 younger and 35 older adults tracked four rotating boxes with a brief 698-millisecond delay before a target appeared. In Experiment 2, 24 younger and 24 older adults viewed static diagonal rectangles with a longer 1380-millisecond delay to see if static displays and extra time helped older adults ignore previously cued objects.
What they found
In the moving display, both groups successfully ignored previously cued locations, but only younger adults showed a delay in responding to cued objects (averaging a small, significant slowdown). However, in the static display with a longer delay, both younger and older adults successfully ignored cued objects, slowing down by 16 and 12 milliseconds respectively. This suggests that older adults can still ignore previously visited objects when those objects remain still and there is sufficient time for inhibition to develop.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study cannot determine whether the preservation of object-based inhibition in older adults during Experiment 2 was caused by the objects being stationary or the or the significantly longer delay of 1380 milliseconds. Furthermore, the researchers did not track participants' eye movements, meaning they could not verify if participants maintained central fixation as instructed. Finally, the relatively small sample sizes of 35 and 24 participants per age group limit the generalizability of these findings to broader older populations.
Key terms
- Inhibition of Return
- A cognitive mechanism that temporarily delays attention from returning to a recently searched location or object to promote efficient visual exploration.
- Exogenous orienting
- The automatic, reflexive redirection of attention toward an unexpected or highly noticeable event in the environment.
- Stimulus onset asynchrony
- The precise amount of time that passes between the start of one stimulus, such as a cue, and the start of a subsequent stimulus, like a target.
- Posterior attentional system
- A brain network, primarily involving the parietal lobe and subcortical areas, responsible for shifting attention to physical spatial locations.
- Anterior attentional system
- A brain network, involving frontal regions, responsible for complex cognitive control, including selecting and filtering specific object features.
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Quiz yourself
What is the classic Inhibition of Return (IOR) effect in spatial cueing paradigms?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use rotating boxes in the first experiment?
They used rotating boxes to separate location-based attention from object-based attention, as the physical object moved away from the initial location where it was cued.
What is the difference between location-based and object-based inhibition of return?
Location-based inhibition slows down your response to a specific coordinate in space, whereas object-based inhibition slows down your response to a physical object, even if that object has moved to a new spot.
Why did older adults show object-based inhibition in the second experiment but not the first?
The second experiment used stationary objects and a much longer cue-to-target delay, which likely reduced cognitive demands and gave older adults' slower inhibitory systems enough time to process and ignore the object.
What does this tell us about how the brain ages?
It suggests that automatic brain networks responsible for spatial attention remain intact, whereas networks handling object features may experience age-related slowing but are not completely broken.
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