Differential Age ‐Related Effects on Visual‐ and Associative‐Based Semantic Encoding

This study investigated how aging modulates semantic encoding. We used a task where participants were required to determine the semantic relatedness between the cue and target stimuli. Single‐character Chinese words were the cues, whereas two‐character words describing the cues were the targets. The targets can be visual‐based (appearance) or associative‐based (meaning). Experiment One compared the reaction times on the two types of targets between older (n = 29) and younger participants (n = 31). Older participants performed significantly slower on the visual‐ than associative‐based trials, while the younger participants showed no difference. The results suggest that aging would hinder semantic encoding of visual‐ rather than associative‐based processes. The slowness in processing is likely attributable to age‐related decline in attentional control. Experiment Two tested the aging effect on top‐down attentional control by presenting pre‐cue before each trial on older (n = 26) and younger participants (n = 49). The results indicated that valid pre‐cue reduced the latency differences between the visual‐ and associative‐based trials among the older participants. The valid pre‐cues were found to effectively shorten the reaction time of the visual‐based trials suggesting possible facilitation of attentional control among the older adults. Our findings substantiate age‐related attentional control decline only in visual‐ but not associati...

Source: Journal of Applied Biobehavioral Research - April 19, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Davynn G. H. Tan, Eric W. Tsang, Kin ‐chung Tang, Chetwyn C. H. Chan, Karen P. Y. Liu, Yi Wu Tags: Original Article Source Type: research