Spatial Attention Measures in Healthy Aging

Maerker, G., Learmonth, G. and Harvey, M. (2016) Spatial Attention Measures in Healthy Aging. 39th European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Barcelona, Spain, 28 Aug - 1 Sept 2016. (doi: 10.1177/0301006616671273)

Abstract

Young adults typically display a processing advantage for the left side of space (‘‘pseudoneglect’’), whereas older adults display no strongly lateralised bias, or indeed a preference towards the right (Benwell et al., 2014; Schmitz & Peigneux, 2011). For young adults, we have recently reported that 5 commonly-used spatial attention tasks (line bisection, landmark, greyscales, gratingscales and lateralised visual detection) all provide stable intra-task measures of bias over time, however no strong inter-task correlations were found (Learmonth et al., 2015). At present there is no systematic evidence for intra- and inter-task consistency in older adults. To investigate this, we tested 22 older adults (mean age ¼ 70.44) on these five tasks, on two different days. Preliminary results show that three of the five tasks (line bisection, landmark and grayscales) seem to provide stable measures over testing sessions, indicating that they measure a consistent property of the spatial attention network. However, as per our previous finding in young adults, there seem to be no significant between-task correlations. Moreover, in contrast to the leftward biases reported in young adults, this elderly age group showed no significant lateral biases on any of the tasks.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Additional Information: Conference abstract published in Perception, Vol. 45(S2) p. 284.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Learmonth, Dr Gemma and Harvey, Professor Monika and Maerker, Ms Gesine
• Authors: Maerker, G., Learmonth, G., and Harvey, M.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures; College of Science and Engineering > School of Psychology
• ISSN: 0301-0066