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

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. We expected that the high-load environment would hurt the older-adults performance due to typical difficulties in ignoring irrelevant stimuli, whereas no such effect would likely occur for the young-adults whose cognitive abilities are at their best. Overall, our results were consistent with our prediction in three 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 are consistent with those obtained when distractors and targets are presented in the same display, now using a paradigm which locates the distractors in the surrounding environment.
The current work is part of the first author’s PhD project who was supported by a PhD fellowship [Ref. SFRH/BD/84279/2012], and Josefa N. S. Pandeirada was supported by the Investigator Grant [Ref. IF/00058/2012/CP0172/CT0002], both provided by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia).