As people age, they change in a myriad of ways — both biological and psychological. Some of these changes may be for the better, and others are not. This book primarily concerns the normally aging brain, the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological changes that occur with age, and the mechanisms that account for them.
Typically, vigilance tasks are used to measure sustained attention, in which people must monitor the environment for a relatively infrequent signal, such as a blip on a radar screen. In general, older adults are not impaired on vigilance tasks. 4. Attention: Summary and Implications.
In another task — the Stroop task — people are asked to name the color of ink in which an incongruent color word is printed, (e.g., the word “red” printed in green). Here, the word information tends to interfere with color naming, causing errors and an increase in response times.
Establishing such links between brain and cognition is the principal goal of cognitive neuroscience. As people age, they change in a myriad of ways — both biological and psychological. Some of these changes may be for the better, and others are not. This book primarily concerns the normally aging brain, the neuroanatomical ...
As noted above, however, some older adults have hearing loss and so, in conversational settings, may be required to interpret a weak or distorted acoustic signal. Even under these conditions, older people seem able to maintain good levels of comprehension by effectively using context to interpret the message [47].
Selective attention refers to the ability to attend to some stimuli while disregarding others that are irrelevant to the task at hand. For example, in visual search tasks, people are asked to search a visual display for a target letter that is surrounded by other nontarget letters.
Cognitive decline is not inevitable. Some older adults retain excellent cognitive function well into their 70s and 80s and perform as well or better than younger adults. Others, although within the normal range, show signs of decline by age 60. In addition, decline is not uniform across cognitive domains.