Changes in visuospatial attention over the adult lifespan

Shifts of visual attention elicited by spatial cues were examined for detection and letter-discrimination tasks in 90 normal adults ranging in age over each decade from the 20s to the 70s. Spatial cues were valid, invalid, or neutral in indicating probable target location and were presented either centrally at fixation or peripherally 6.7 degrees to the left or right of fixation. Stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between cue and target was varied between 200, 500 and 2000 msec. Reaction time (RT) costs and benefits associated with spatial cueing did not vary with age for: (1) the detection task; (2) the letter-discrimination task with peripheral cues; and (3) the letter-discrimination task with central cues at a short (200 msec) SOA. RT costs and benefits increased with age only for SOAs greater than 200 msec with central cueing in the discrimination task. In general, the efficiency of cue-based shifts of visuospatial attention appears relatively resistant to the effects of adult age up to 79 years. When an age effect was found, RT costs and benefits increased steadily across all age decades, the correlation with age being 0.25 and 0.38 for the 500 and 2000 msec SOAs, respectively. The findings suggest a qualitative difference in the influence of normal adult aging and effects of dementia noted in previous studies; normal aging has only a weak influence on voluntary attention shifts, whereas dementia affects both voluntary and involuntary modes of attention shifting.