On the preservation of vigilant attention to semantic information in healthy aging

Despite decades of research on younger adults, little is known about the way in which vigilant attention is affected by healthy aging, and the small body of work that does exist has yielded mixed findings. Prior examinations of aging and vigilant attention have focused almost exclusively on sensory/perceptual tasks despite the fact that many real-world vigilance tasks are semantic in nature and it has been shown that older adults exhibit memory and attention deficits in semantic tasks in other domains. Here, we present the first empirical investigation of vigilant attention to verbal stimuli in healthy normal aging. In Experiment 1 we find that older adults are just as able as younger adults to identify critical targets defined by category membership (both overall and over time). In Experiment 2, we increase the difficulty of the task by changing the target category from one block to the next, but again find no age-group effects in accuracy. Response time data, however, show that older adults respond more slowly and subjective ratings indicate that older adults experience higher workload and arousal compared to their younger counterparts. The practical as well as theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.