The psychological refractory period: evidence for age differences in attentional time-sharing

Abstract

The authors report 2 psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments in which the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between Task 1 and Task 2 was 150 ms, 250 ms, 600 ms, and 1,100 ms for both younger and older adults. H. Pashler's (1994a) response-selection bottleneck theory predicts that SOA manipulations should not affect Task 1 performance, but that reaction time (RT) for Task 2 should increase as the SOA between the 2 tasks decreases (i.e., the classical PRP effect). In Experiment 1 (Task 1 = tone discrimination, Task 2 = dot location), older adults showed a larger PRP effect than younger adults did, although Task 1 RT was affected by SOA, suggesting that participants were grouping their responses on some trials. That is, participants were holding their response for Task 1 until they had completed processing Task 2, and then they responded to both tasks almost simultaneously. However, a subset of participants (11 younger adults and 11 older adults) who showed no evidence of response grouping on Task 1 continued to show a larger PRP effect for older adults on Task 2. In Experiment 2 (Task 1 = dot location, Task 2 = simultaneous letter matching), older adults continued to show a larger PRP effect than younger adults for Task 2, and Task 1 performance was unaffected by SOA. Consequently, these experiments provide evidence that older adults (relative to younger adults) exhibit a decrement in time-sharing at the response-selection stage of processing. These results suggest that attentional time-sharing needs to be added to the list of topics examined in aging research on varieties of attention.