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Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study

We studied a Posner-type gaze-cued version of a Simon task to characterize age-related changes in visuospatial attention and inhibitory control. Earlier results had indicated that the direction of gaze is a strong social cue that speeds response times; so we wondered whether, as a task-irrelevant st...

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Autores principales: Nagy, Boglárka, Czigler, István, File, Domonkos, Gaál, Zsófia Anna
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7239486/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32433679
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233496
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author Nagy, Boglárka
Czigler, István
File, Domonkos
Gaál, Zsófia Anna
author_facet Nagy, Boglárka
Czigler, István
File, Domonkos
Gaál, Zsófia Anna
author_sort Nagy, Boglárka
collection PubMed
description We studied a Posner-type gaze-cued version of a Simon task to characterize age-related changes in visuospatial attention and inhibitory control. Earlier results had indicated that the direction of gaze is a strong social cue that speeds response times; so we wondered whether, as a task-irrelevant stimulus, it could compensate for age-related impairment of inhibitory processes in the elderly. Our results assessed the Simon effect by: reaction time, error rate, the P3 component and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP). We found that the Simon effect was larger in the older group confirming an increased sensitivity to interference and also suggesting a decreased inhibitory control in older adults. LRP results showed that aging and stimulus-response incongruency delayed the selection of the responses–indexed by longer s-LRP latency data–, and also decreased the efficiency of motor inhibition in the Simon task–the s-LRP amplitude of both wrong- and correct-side activation was larger in older adults, and the latency difference of these two components was longer in this age-group. Also a larger N2pc amplitude in the congruent, compared to incongruent gaze condition, showed an increased visuospatial attention when the gaze-cueing drew attention to the target stimulus. This gaze-cueing could not be ignored and hence it modified task processing in the older age group, which was evident in the incongruent Simon condition where the congruent gaze increased older adults’ reaction time and their error rate; but there was no difference observed in the congruent Simon condition. Since the anticipated facilitation of reaction times did not occur, we suggest that general slowing and decreased inhibitory functions in the elderly caused the social cue not to be a supporting stimulus but rather to be a further burden on their cognitive processing.
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spelling pubmed-72394862020-06-08 Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study Nagy, Boglárka Czigler, István File, Domonkos Gaál, Zsófia Anna PLoS One Research Article We studied a Posner-type gaze-cued version of a Simon task to characterize age-related changes in visuospatial attention and inhibitory control. Earlier results had indicated that the direction of gaze is a strong social cue that speeds response times; so we wondered whether, as a task-irrelevant stimulus, it could compensate for age-related impairment of inhibitory processes in the elderly. Our results assessed the Simon effect by: reaction time, error rate, the P3 component and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP). We found that the Simon effect was larger in the older group confirming an increased sensitivity to interference and also suggesting a decreased inhibitory control in older adults. LRP results showed that aging and stimulus-response incongruency delayed the selection of the responses–indexed by longer s-LRP latency data–, and also decreased the efficiency of motor inhibition in the Simon task–the s-LRP amplitude of both wrong- and correct-side activation was larger in older adults, and the latency difference of these two components was longer in this age-group. Also a larger N2pc amplitude in the congruent, compared to incongruent gaze condition, showed an increased visuospatial attention when the gaze-cueing drew attention to the target stimulus. This gaze-cueing could not be ignored and hence it modified task processing in the older age group, which was evident in the incongruent Simon condition where the congruent gaze increased older adults’ reaction time and their error rate; but there was no difference observed in the congruent Simon condition. Since the anticipated facilitation of reaction times did not occur, we suggest that general slowing and decreased inhibitory functions in the elderly caused the social cue not to be a supporting stimulus but rather to be a further burden on their cognitive processing. Public Library of Science 2020-05-20 /pmc/articles/PMC7239486/ /pubmed/32433679 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233496 Text en © 2020 Nagy et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Nagy, Boglárka
Czigler, István
File, Domonkos
Gaál, Zsófia Anna
Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study
title Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study
title_full Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study
title_fullStr Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study
title_full_unstemmed Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study
title_short Can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—An ERP study
title_sort can irrelevant but salient visual cues compensate for the age-related decline in cognitive conflict resolution?—an erp study
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7239486/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32433679
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233496
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