Motivational incentives modulate age differences in visual perception.

This study examined whether motivational incentives modulate age-related perceptual deficits. Younger and older adults performed a perceptual discrimination task in which bicolored stimuli had to be classified according to their dominating color. The valent color was associated with either a positive or negative payoff, whereas the neutral color was not associated with a payoff. Effects of incentives on perceptual efficiency and response bias were estimated using the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978). Perception of neutral stimuli showed age-related decline, whereas perception of valent stimuli, both positive and negative, showed no age difference. This finding is interpreted in terms of preserved top-down control over the allocation of perceptual processing resources in healthy aging.

[1]  P. Greenwood.  Functional plasticity in cognitive aging: review and hypothesis. , 2007, Neuropsychology.

[2]  C. Summerfield,et al.  Expectation (and attention) in visual cognition , 2009, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[3]  Andreas Voss,et al.  Fast-dm: A free program for efficient diffusion model analysis , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[4]  F. Craik,et al.  The handbook of aging and cognition , 1992 .

[5]  Leslie G. Ungerleider,et al.  The neural systems that mediate human perceptual decision making , 2008, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[6]  Roger Ratcliff,et al.  A Theory of Memory Retrieval. , 1978 .

[7]  Andreas Voss,et al.  Aging and emotional memory: cognitive mechanisms underlying the positivity effect. , 2008, Psychology and aging.

[8]  Jeffrey N. Rouder,et al.  Modeling Response Times for Two-Choice Decisions , 1998 .

[9]  R. Ratcliff,et al.  A diffusion model analysis of the effects of aging on brightness discrimination , 2003, Perception & psychophysics.

[10]  D. Balota,et al.  Memory efficiency and the strategic control of attention at encoding: impairments of value-directed remembering in Alzheimer's disease. , 2009, Neuropsychology.

[11]  Paul B. Baltes,et al.  Successful aging: Perspectives from the behavioral sciences , 1990 .

[12]  R. Cabeza,et al.  Que PASA? The posterior-anterior shift in aging. , 2008, Cerebral cortex.

[13]  Roberto Cabeza,et al.  Aging Gracefully: Compensatory Brain Activity in High-Performing Older Adults , 2002, NeuroImage.

[14]  P. Baltes,et al.  Psychological perspectives on successful aging: The model of selective optimization with compensation. , 1990 .

[15]  M. Mather,et al.  Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[16]  Roger Ratcliff,et al.  The Diffusion Decision Model: Theory and Data for Two-Choice Decision Tasks , 2008, Neural Computation.

[17]  Jocelyn Faubert,et al.  Visual perception and aging. , 2002, Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale.

[18]  David J. Madden,et al.  Aging and Recognition Memory: Changes in Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Associated with Components of Reaction Time Distributions , 1999, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[19]  Brian Knutson,et al.  Affect dynamics, affective forecasting, and aging. , 2008, Emotion.

[20]  P. Baltes,et al.  Sensory functioning and intelligence in old age: a strong connection. , 1994, Psychology and aging.

[21]  C. Grady.  Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging , 2008, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[22]  J. Maser,et al.  Panic: Psychological Perspectives , 1988 .

[23]  D. Watson,et al.  Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[24]  R. Ratcliff,et al.  A diffusion model analysis of the effects of aging on letter discrimination. , 2003, Psychology and aging.

[25]  R. Cabeza,et al.  Task-independent and task-specific age effects on brain activity during working memory, visual attention and episodic retrieval. , 2004, Cerebral cortex.

[26]  L. Pessoa.  How do emotion and motivation direct executive control? , 2009, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[27]  David J. Madden,et al.  Searching from the Top Down: Ageing and Attentional Guidance during Singleton Detection , 2005, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[28]  M. Rugg,et al.  Age effects on the neural correlates of episodic retrieval: increased cortical recruitment with matched performance. , 2007, Cerebral cortex.

[29]  J. Driver,et al.  Modulation of visual processing by attention and emotion: windows on causal interactions between human brain regions , 2007, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[30]  Anthony R. McIntosh,et al.  Task-related activity in prefrontal cortex and its relation to recognition memory performance in young and old adults , 2005, Neuropsychologia.

[31]  Richard L. Gregory,et al.  Eye and brain: The psychology of seeing, 2nd ed. , 1973 .

[32]  A. Voss,et al.  Interpreting the parameters of the diffusion model: An empirical validation , 2004, Memory & cognition.

[33]  Denise C. Park,et al.  Handbook of the Psychology of Aging , 1979 .

[34]  R. Ratcliff.  Theoretical interpretations of the speed and accuracy of positive and negative responses. , 1985, Psychological review.

[35]  Paige E. Scalf,et al.  The implications of cortical recruitment and brain morphology for individual differences in inhibitory function in aging humans. , 2005, Psychology and aging.

[36]  B. Schneider,et al.  Implications of perceptual deterioration for cognitive aging research. , 2000 .

[37]  D. Isaacowitz,et al.  Preferences for emotional information in older and younger adults: a meta-analysis of memory and attention tasks. , 2008, Psychology and aging.

[38]  Peter N. C. Mohr,et al.  Neuroeconomics and aging: Neuromodulation of economic decision making in old age , 2010, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[39]  Andreas Voss,et al.  A fast numerical algorithm for the estimation of diffusion model parameters , 2008 .

[40]  Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin,et al.  Anticipation of monetary gain but not loss in healthy older adults , 2007, Nature Neuroscience.

[41]  R. Gregory.  Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing , 1966 .

[42]  Aaron S Benjamin,et al.  The effects of aging on selectivity and control in short-term recall , 2002, Memory & cognition.

[43]  J. Raven,et al.  Manual for Raven's progressive matrices and vocabulary scales , 1962 .

[44]  R Ratcliff,et al.  The effects of aging on reaction time in a signal detection task. , 2001, Psychology and aging.

[45]  A. Voss,et al.  Interpreting ambiguous stimuli: Separating perceptual and judgmental biases. , 2008 .

[46]  Antonino Vallesi,et al.  Overrecruitment in the Aging Brain as a Function of Task Demands: Evidence for a Compensatory View , 2011, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[47]  L. Carstensen,et al.  Social and emotional aging. , 2010, Annual review of psychology.

[48]  J. Mikels,et al.  Aging and the Intersection of Cognition, Motivation, and Emotion , 2006 .

[49]  S. Folstein,et al.  "Mini-mental state". A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. , 1975, Journal of psychiatric research.

[50]  Leslie G. Ungerleider,et al.  Age-related changes in cortical blood flow activation during visual processing of faces and location , 1994, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[51]  Philip L. Smith,et al.  A comparison of sequential sampling models for two-choice reaction time. , 2004, Psychological review.

[52]  J. Logan,et al.  Under-Recruitment and Nonselective Recruitment Dissociable Neural Mechanisms Associated with Aging , 2002, Neuron.

[53]  R. Ratcliff,et al.  Estimating parameters of the diffusion model: Approaches to dealing with contaminant reaction times and parameter variability , 2002, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[54]  Richard Ridderinkhof,et al.  Remedial Effects of Motivational Incentive on Declining Cognitive Control In Healthy Aging and Parkinson's Disease , 2010, Front. Ag. Neurosci..

[55]  T. Hess.  Memory and aging in context. , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[56]  P. D. Spear,et al.  Neural bases of visual deficits during aging , 1993, Vision Research.

[57]  Cindy Lustig,et al.  Evidence for frontally mediated controlled processing differences in older adults. , 2006, Cerebral cortex.

[58]  Julia Spaniol,et al.  Adult age differences in the implicit and explicit components of top-down attentional guidance during visual search. , 2005, Psychology and aging.

[59]  J. Werner,et al.  Sensitivity of human foveal color mechanisms throughout the life span. , 1988, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics and image science.