Older adults demonstrate increased distractibility by task-irrelevant information which contributes to general cognitive impairment. However, it is yet unclear how changes in noradrenergic activity during aging influences attentional control. In the current study, tonic noradrenergic activity will be increased or decreased to investigate its behavioral and neural effects on attentional control.
Study Type
OBSERVATIONAL
Enrollment
140
USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology
Los Angeles, California, United States
Initial Eye-movements Toward Target and Distractor Shapes Measured by an Eye-tracker
The oculomotor suppression effect is a lower likelihood that salient display items will be the target of the initial eye movement in a visual search task compared to nonsalient display items. This effect is calculated from the percentage of first saccades toward a non-target stimuli subtracted by the percentage of first saccades toward the distractor stimuli. Greater % of first saccades toward the target would demonstrate better goal-directed attentional control and greater % of first saccades toward the distractor would demonstrate increased distractibility. Thus, a greater oculomotor suppression effect would demonstrate an increased ability to inhibit salient information that is irrelevant to the task.
Time frame: Calculated once at the end of the 1 day experiment
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