SUSTAINED ATTENTION AND AGING - OVERCOMING THE DECREMENT

A literature review found equivocal evidence of a performance decline at senescence on sustained attention (vigilance) tasks. The strongest evidence for such age effects was from Parasuraman and Giambra (PG; 19 91). It was hypothesized that reduced perceptual and information-proce ssing abilities of older adults (i.e., non-sustained attentional compo nents of the task) were responsible for the age effects reported by PG and that such outcomes could be eliminated or reduced by minimizing t he influence of those components. in Tasks 1 (n = 457) and 2 (n = 427) , which used PG's procedure and stimulus conditions, age effects on de tection accuracy and on the detection time decrement were not found. F alse alarms were significantly greater in the old group than in the yo ung group. In Task 3 (n = 417), which minimized non-sustained attentio n components, some marginal evidence of age effects emerged. Potential explanations of these outcomes, such as an extremely small age effect , sampling bias, power differences, and undetected visual difficulties are considered, and further manipulations and controls are proposed.