Citation

Cid-Fernández S, Lindín M, Díaz F. Biol. Psychol. 2015; 113: 12-23.

Affiliation

Laboratory: Laboratorio de Neurociencia Cognitiva, Facultade de Psicoloxía, Departamento de Psicoloxía Clínica e Psicobioloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Galiza, Spain. Electronic address: fernando.diaz@usc.es.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.11.002

PMID

26589359

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of aging and attentional capture provoked by novel auditory stimuli on behavior (reaction time [RT], hits) and on response-related brain potentials (preRFP, CRN, postRFP, parietalRP) to target visual stimuli. Twenty-two young, 27 middle-aged, and 24 old adults performed an auditory-visual distraction-attention task. The RTs and latencies of preRFP, postRFP and parietalRT were longer in old and middle-aged than in young participants, reflecting the well-established age-related slowing of processing and performance. The inter-peak latencies (P3b-preRFP, preRFP-parietalRP, parietalRP-postRFP) were also longer in old and middle-aged than in young participants, further indicating an age-related tendency to increased predominance of serial (rather than parallel) processing of information, and that preRFP, CRN, postRFP, and parietalRP represent different cognitive processes from those indexed by the stimulus-related P3b. Finally, a distraction effect in performance (all three groups) and in postRFP latency (only middle-aged group) was also observed.


Keywords: Driver distraction;

Language: en