Sustained attention and aging: overcoming the decrement?

A literature review found equivocal evidence of a performance decline at senescence on sustained attention (vigilance) tasks. The strongest evidence for such age effects was from Parasuraman and Giambra (PG; 1991). It was hypothesized that reduced perceptual and information-processing abilities of older adults (i.e., non-sustained attentional components of the task) were responsible for the age effects reported by PG and that such outcomes could be eliminated or reduced by minimizing the influence of those components. In Tasks 1 (n = 457) and 2 (n = 427), which used PG's procedure and stimulus conditions, age effects on detection accuracy and on the detection time decrement were not found. False alarms were significantly greater in the old group than in the young group. In Task 3 (n = 417), which minimized non-sustained attention components, some marginal evidence of age effects emerged. Potential explanations of these outcomes, such as an extremely small age effect, sampling bias, power differences, and undetected visual difficulties are considered, and further manipulations and controls are proposed.