Interference and attentional switching in aging.

Objective: Diffusion decision modeling (DDM) is a validated cognitive modeling method that has been used to provide insights into why older adults are slower than younger adults on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. DDM results have shown that increased processing time, caution, and sensorimotor factors have explained most of this slowing. Enhanced attentional processing of irrelevant information by older adults has also been reported in DDM studies but not explicitly studied. This enhanced processing of interference has been attributed to a motivational goal-directed decision to minimize errors by increasing accumulation of information (i.e., caution) rather than neurocognitive changes associated with aging. No DDM study has explicitly investigated interference and aging by comparing single task and dual performance within the framework of attentional control to explore more fully what and how attentional processes are involved. Our study attempts to fill these gaps.

Method: We used a choice response time (RT) task of attentional switching with and without interference and applied the EZ-diffusion model on the data of 117 healthy younger and older adults aged 18-87.

Results: Repeated mixed-measures analyses of variance of DDM parameters found that longer nondecision time was the main driver for longer RTs for older adults on both attentional switch tasks, but more prominently on the attentional switch trials of the dual task.

Conclusions: Processing interference before the decision to switch attention was the main driver of increased RTs for older adults. Rather than motivational goal-directed factors for error minimization (i.e., caution), findings supported neurocognitive and inhibition deficit explanations. Future DDM studies into cognition and aging could consider how difficulties inhibiting interference impacts on the cognitive processes under investigation and whether the concept of caution is applicable. Findings raise functional considerations for older adults on visually oriented tasks that require attentional switching (e.g., work vs. driving). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).