Adult Age Differences in Exogenous Orienting of Vigilance Task Performance

Attention plays crucial role in our daily life activities. Variety of behavioral inefficiencies during old age may result due to age related changes in attention. Among cognitive changes which accompany healthy ageing, changes in attentional ability is the fundamental one. Vigilance performance tends to decline as the age increases. Orienting attention towards a particular location leads to better processing of information at that location thereby improving performance. Previous studies have shown improvement in vigilance performance when the paradigm of orienting was combined with vigilance. Present study examined the age difference in vigilance performance when the attention was oriented exogenously, using spatial cueing paradigm. Cues were presented at peripheral location at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 300ms. Target and non-target was the square of size 3.3 cm 3.0 cm respectively. The participant's task was to pay attention to the cue and then to make a speeded decision about the presence or absence of the target by pressing the response key. A 2 (Age Group: Young and Old) x 3 (Cue validity: valid, invalid and neutral) x 3 (Time period: 3 Blocks of 10 min. each) analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measure on last two factor. Correct detection (hits), incorrect detection (F.A.) and reaction time were recorded as performance measures. Results revealed that performance was facilitated under valid cue condition for both young and old adults. Overall detection was more for young adults while vigilance decrement was more for older adults than young adults. It further indicated qualitative difference on vigilance performances in young and old adults.