Older People More Easily Distracted than the Young

‘Bang! You’re Dead’, a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, continues to surprise – but not just with the twist in its tale. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have used the programme to show that young people respond in a similar way to events, but as we age our thought patterns diverge.

The study, published today in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, also found that older people tended to be more easily distracted than younger adults.

Age is believed to change the way our brains respond and how its networks interact, but studies looking at these changes tend to use very artificial experiments, with basic stimuli. To try to understand how we respond to complex, life-like stimuli, researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) showed 218 subjects aged 18-88 an edited version of an episode from the Hitchcock TV series while using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity.

The researchers found a surprising degree of similarity in the thought patterns amongst the younger subjects – their brains tended to ‘light up’ in similar ways and at similar points in the programme. However, in older subjects, this similarity tended to disappear and their thought processes became more idiosyncratic, suggesting that they were responding differently to what they were watching and were possibly more distracted.

The greatest differences were seen in the ‘higher order’ regions at the front of the brain, which are responsible for controlling attention (the superior frontal lobe and the intraparietal sulcus) and language processing (the bilateral middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus).

The findings suggest that our ability to respond to everyday events in the environment differs with age, possibly due to altered patterns of attention.

Dr Karen Campbell from the Department of Psychology, first author on the study, says: “As we age, our ability to control the focus of attention tends to decline, and we end up attending to more ‘distracting’ information than younger adults. As a result, older adults end up attending to a more diverse range of stimuli and so are more likely to understand and interpret everyday events in different ways than younger people.”

This image shows a drawing of Alfred Hitchcock.
The findings suggest that our ability to respond to everyday events in the environment differs with age, possibly due to altered patterns of attention. Credit: photographymontreal.

In order to encourage audiences to respond to movies and TV programmes in the same way as everyone else, and hence have a ‘shared experience’, directors and cinematographers use a variety of techniques to draw attention to the focal item in each shot. When the stimulus is less engaging – for example, when one character is talking at length or the action is slow, people show less overlap in their neural patterns of activity, suggesting that a stimulus needs to be sufficiently captivating in order to drive attention. However, capturing attention is not sufficient when watching a film; the brain needs to maintain attention or at the very least, to limit attention to that information which is most relevant to the plot.

Dr Campbell and colleagues argue that the variety in brain patterns seen amongst older people reflects a difference in their ability to control their attention, as attentional capture by stimuli in the environment is known to be relatively preserved with age. This supports previous research which shows that older adults respond to and better remember materials with emotional content.

“We know that regions at the front of the brain are responsible for maintaining our attention, and these are the areas that see the greatest structural changes as we ages, and it is these changes that we believe are being reflected in our study,” she adds. “There may well be benefits to this distractibility. Attending to lots of different information could help with our creativity, for example.”

About this aging and psychology research

Funding: Cam-CAN is supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Source: Craig Brierley – University Cambridge
Image Source: The image credited to photographymontreal and is in the public domain
Original Research: Full open access research for “Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control” by Karen L. Campbell, Meredith A. Shafto, Paul Wright, Kamen A. Tsvetanov, Linda Geerligs, Rhodri Cusack, and Lorraine K. Tyler in Neurobiology of Aging. Published online August 5 2015 doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2015.07.028


Abstract

Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control

Much is known about how age affects the brain during tightly controlled, though largely contrived, experiments, but do these effects extrapolate to everyday life? Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, closely mimic the real world and provide a window onto the brain’s ability to respond in a timely and measured fashion to complex, everyday events. Young adults respond to these stimuli in a highly synchronized fashion, but it remains to be seen how age affects neural responsiveness during naturalistic viewing. To this end, we scanned a large (N = 218), population-based sample from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) during movie-watching. Intersubject synchronization declined with age, such that older adults’ response to the movie was more idiosyncratic. This decreased synchrony related to cognitive measures sensitive to attentional control. Our findings suggest that neural responsivity changes with age, which likely has important implications for real-world event comprehension and memory.

“Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control” by Karen L. Campbell, Meredith A. Shafto, Paul Wright, Kamen A. Tsvetanov, Linda Geerligs, Rhodri Cusack, and Lorraine K. Tyler in Neurobiology of Aging. Published online August 5 2015 doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2015.07.028

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  1. The older we become, the more information we have stored, the more agile must be the attention scan function, the easier for incoming stimuli to elicit the scan mode seeking similarities & comparisons for solution selection. If the experiment were differently structured, the results should point to greater variety of material at hand & consequent attentional flexibility for response options, an asset not a liability. For producers to seek identical audience reaction suggests attempts at response engineering, implying mind control. In the practical world, when I watch pilots entering the plane I’m aboard, I want to see grey hair. Stephan T. Vitas

  2. Alright, I’m prejudiced, I’m old–71. It may be that older folks have been there, done that for most TV/movie plots–maybe we can almost predict what is happening next. Therefore, we split attention: one eye on the program/movie to see if something really interesting might happen and one eye on something else that we want to do, e.g., scanning e-mail, that also does not require full attention. Personally, I always found Hitchcock to be a bit uninteresting: he was a thrill-seeker and I was not.

  3. Would like to see similar study on older adults engaged in high-focus activities: model ship building, carpentry, watch/clock restoration, etc.

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