Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 31, Issue 4, 15 July 2006, Pages 1682-1692
NeuroImage

Changing channels: An fMRI study of aging and cross-modal attention shifts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.01.045Get rights and content

Abstract

Age-related deficits in visual selective attention suggest that the efficiency of inhibitory processes is particularly affected by aging. To investigate whether processing inefficiencies observed in visual attention are similar in auditory attention and when shifting attention across modalities, we conducted an fMRI study with healthy young and older adults using a task that required sustained auditory and visual selective attention and cross-modal attention shifts. Older adults in this study performed as well as the younger adults, but showed age-related differences in BOLD responses. The most striking of these differences were bilateral frontal and parietal regions of significantly increased activation in older adults during both focused and shifting attention. Our data suggest that this increased activation did not reflect new recruitment, but reliance on brain regions typically used by younger adults when task demands are greater. Older adults' activation patterns suggested that even during focused attention conditions they were “shifting” attention to stimuli in the unattended modality. Increased activation during processing of both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information implies age-related loss of processing selectivity. These patterns may reflect both task-specific compensatory neural recruitment and degradation of sensory inhibition.

Section snippets

Participants

Ten older adults (six females, four males, age range: 65 to 89 years; mean = 70.7 ± 7) and 10 younger adults (six females, four males, age range 18 to 41 years; mean = 27.9 ± 8) were recruited from the community for this study. All participants were right handed, had normal or corrected vision, and had no reported history of major medical illness, neurological or psychiatric disorder, head trauma, or substance abuse. One of the older adults was being treated with an antidepressant medication at

Behavioral findings

The group mean percent correct target detection and response time results from the three AV task conditions are shown in Fig. 2. There were no statistically significant differences between groups in target detection accuracy, although the older adult group accuracy was numerically lower than the younger adult group, particularly in the two focus attention conditions. Both the older and younger adult groups were more accurate in visual target detection than auditory target detection across the

Discussion

The most striking age-related differences in BOLD responses from this study were bilateral frontal and parietal regions of significantly increased activation in older adults during both focus and shift tasks. Considered separately, results from the focus attention tasks are consistent with a number of studies reporting that older adults typically produce more widespread activation than younger adults when task performance is similar. Quite often, this is interpreted as evidence that older

Summary and conclusions

Our data show that, in healthy, cognitively intact older adults, there are processing inefficiencies associated with visual, auditory, and cross-modal attention. Older adults in this study performed as well as the younger adults, but with striking age-related differences in BOLD responses. While younger adults showed succinct and focal regional activations associated with attention and sensory processing, older adults showed significantly larger and more widespread activation in these same

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by funding awarded to J.T. from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, 5RO1-AG18030.

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