No impact of age on performance in a crossmodal task-switching paradigm
Wed-P14-Poster III-105
Presented by: Ludivine Schils
The congruency effect refers to the difference in performance between congruent and incongruent trials. This congruency effect sometimes is asymmetric. More specifically, in general the visual modality tends to dominate the auditory modality (i.e., visual dominance effect). Accordingly, an asymmetric congruency effect (ACE) between auditory and visual target stimuli has been consistently observed when switching between these two modalities: attending an auditory target with a concurrent visual distractor leads to worse performance than vice-versa. Besides, aging is accompanied by specific impairments, especially with regards to stimulus modalities and task-switching (at the mixing-costs level). However, to our knowledge, no study ever investigated the role of aging when switching between target modalities with concurrent distractors in another modality. In our experiment, we exposed younger and older participants to unimodal central cues, followed by bimodal lateralized stimuli. They answered manually depending on the target stimulus modality (i.e., spatial judgment task with compatible spatial mapping). As expected, we found an ACE, as well as an over-impairment in mixing-costs for older adults. However, results showed no specific age-related deterioration with regard to the asymmetric congruency effect. This tends to indicate that older adults, compared to younger adults, are equally impaired in crossmodal task-switching.
Keywords: Aging, crossmodality, task-switching, spatial selective attention