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  • 9 - From Perception to Action: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Influences on Age Differences in Attention

  • from Part II - Mechanisms of Cognitive Aging
  • Edited by Ayanna K. Thomas, Tufts University, Massachusetts, Angela Gutchess, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Aging
    Published online:
    28 May 2020
    Print publication:
    28 May 2020, pp 161-178

  • Summary

    Discussions of age differences in attention often start with the heuristic that older adults show reductions in top-down, goal-driven controlled attention compared to young adults, but relatively preserved bottom-up, stimulus-driven, and more automatic attentional functions. However, age differences in sensorimotor function can reduce the bottom-up salience of environmental stimuli. This can in turn lead to seemingly paradoxical findings of larger age-related deficits in very simple tasks that rely almost entirely on bottom-up attention than those that make moderate, but still-achievable, demands on top-down attention, and thus present opportunities for compensation. We suggest that just as attention represents the interplay of sensory and cognitive function, some of the most interesting and important age differences in attention occur at the interplay of top-down and bottom-up processes. New directions for the field include an increasing emphasis on the additional interplay between cognitive and motivational processes, and their physiological basis.