The influence of the visual surrounding environment in older adults and young adults’ cognitive performance: an alternative paradigm

Abstract

This study investigated how the characteristics of the visual surrounding environment influence older and young adults’ cognitive performance. Sixty-four older adults and 64 young adults performed four visual cognitive tasks (attention and memory tasks) in two independent sessions while being exposed to a high-load and a low-load visual surrounding environment. Considering the difficulties that older adults often have in ignoring irrelevant stimuli, we expected their performance to be poorer when exposed to the high-load as compared to the low-load environment. On the other hand, young-adults’ performance, whose cognitive abilities are at their best, should be less susceptible to be influenced by this manipulation. Overall, our results were consistent with our prediction in three of the tasks (go/no-go, choice reaction time, and Corsi block-tapping). Additionally, the older adults performed worse than the young adults in all tasks, thus confirming expected age-related differences. Our results suggest that the difficulties displayed by the older adults in ignoring distractors when targets and distractors are in the same display (as revealed by the typical procedure) expand to paradigms in which the distractors are present in the surrounding environment.