This study’s goal is to explore and identify the extent to which cognitive load impacts everyday activities that depend on our abilities to attend, integrate, and process visuospatial information (Làdavas & Berti, 2020; Stirling & Elliott, 2008). Through visuospatial attention and multisensory integration, we can pick up salient information, bind it together and construct a representation of what we’re perceiving (Keil, 2020; Stirling & Elliott, 2008). However, the influence of cognitive load impacts these processes. In fact, the attentive resources of our brains are limited, which leads us to inevitably allocate them according to task difficulty and to unintentionally ignore certain stimuli (Broadbent, 1958; Treisman, 1964; Wahn & König, 2017). In young, healthy individuals, for example, a general bias towards left-presented stimuli is usually present (Kinsbourne, 1970, 1987; Reuter-lorenz et al., 1990). However, when cognitive load is increased, the bias seems to shift towards the right rather than the left (Naert et al., 2018). This doesn’t seem to occur in older people, due to age-related compensatory processes aimed to contrast the physiological decline (Casagrande et al., 2021). Cognitive load has also been shown to influence multisensory integration, with a general performance exacerbation using SIFI experiments (Michail et al., 2021). To the best of our knowledge, no study so far has investigated how cognitive load influences the ability to attend to lateralized stimuli and to integrate multisensory information in older adults and younger adults to then compare them. For this reason, in this study two separate groups of individuals underwent a dual task experiment that involves both lateralized multisensory stimuli detection and working memory tasks that could generate either a high or low cognitive load to interfere with the primary task. From the analysis of the data obtained, both younger and older groups revealed to be susceptible to the SIFI effects, displaying less accuracy in audio-visual stimuli detection during the incongruent rather than congruent trials. However, the experiments have yielded mixed results regarding the effects of reduced attentional resources on such detection tasks. While the group of younger participates appeared to be affected by the impact of cognitive load, this wasn’t revealed for most of the trial type conditions in the group of older individuals. Moreover, neither group showed a preference for the side on which the lateralized visual stimuli were displayed, suggesting the absence of any bias towards the left or the right visual field.
This study’s goal is to explore and identify the extent to which cognitive load impacts everyday activities that depend on our abilities to attend, integrate, and process visuospatial information (Làdavas & Berti, 2020; Stirling & Elliott, 2008). Through visuospatial attention and multisensory integration, we can pick up salient information, bind it together and construct a representation of what we’re perceiving (Keil, 2020; Stirling & Elliott, 2008). However, the influence of cognitive load impacts these processes. In fact, the attentive resources of our brains are limited, which leads us to inevitably allocate them according to task difficulty and to unintentionally ignore certain stimuli (Broadbent, 1958; Treisman, 1964; Wahn & König, 2017). In young, healthy individuals, for example, a general bias towards left-presented stimuli is usually present (Kinsbourne, 1970, 1987; Reuter-lorenz et al., 1990). However, when cognitive load is increased, the bias seems to shift towards the right rather than the left (Naert et al., 2018). This doesn’t seem to occur in older people, due to age-related compensatory processes aimed to contrast the physiological decline (Casagrande et al., 2021). Cognitive load has also been shown to influence multisensory integration, with a general performance exacerbation using SIFI experiments (Michail et al., 2021). To the best of our knowledge, no study so far has investigated how cognitive load influences the ability to attend to lateralized stimuli and to integrate multisensory information in older adults and younger adults to then compare them. For this reason, in this study two separate groups of individuals underwent a dual task experiment that involves both lateralized multisensory stimuli detection and working memory tasks that could generate either a high or low cognitive load to interfere with the primary task. From the analysis of the data obtained, both younger and older groups revealed to be susceptible to the SIFI effects, displaying less accuracy in audio-visual stimuli detection during the incongruent rather than congruent trials. However, the experiments have yielded mixed results regarding the effects of reduced attentional resources on such detection tasks. While the group of younger participates appeared to be affected by the impact of cognitive load, this wasn’t revealed for most of the trial type conditions in the group of older individuals. Moreover, neither group showed a preference for the side on which the lateralized visual stimuli were displayed, suggesting the absence of any bias towards the left or the right visual field.
The influence of cognitive load on visuospatial processing and multisensory integration in older adults
MANNI, SOFIA
2021/2022
Abstract
This study’s goal is to explore and identify the extent to which cognitive load impacts everyday activities that depend on our abilities to attend, integrate, and process visuospatial information (Làdavas & Berti, 2020; Stirling & Elliott, 2008). Through visuospatial attention and multisensory integration, we can pick up salient information, bind it together and construct a representation of what we’re perceiving (Keil, 2020; Stirling & Elliott, 2008). However, the influence of cognitive load impacts these processes. In fact, the attentive resources of our brains are limited, which leads us to inevitably allocate them according to task difficulty and to unintentionally ignore certain stimuli (Broadbent, 1958; Treisman, 1964; Wahn & König, 2017). In young, healthy individuals, for example, a general bias towards left-presented stimuli is usually present (Kinsbourne, 1970, 1987; Reuter-lorenz et al., 1990). However, when cognitive load is increased, the bias seems to shift towards the right rather than the left (Naert et al., 2018). This doesn’t seem to occur in older people, due to age-related compensatory processes aimed to contrast the physiological decline (Casagrande et al., 2021). Cognitive load has also been shown to influence multisensory integration, with a general performance exacerbation using SIFI experiments (Michail et al., 2021). To the best of our knowledge, no study so far has investigated how cognitive load influences the ability to attend to lateralized stimuli and to integrate multisensory information in older adults and younger adults to then compare them. For this reason, in this study two separate groups of individuals underwent a dual task experiment that involves both lateralized multisensory stimuli detection and working memory tasks that could generate either a high or low cognitive load to interfere with the primary task. From the analysis of the data obtained, both younger and older groups revealed to be susceptible to the SIFI effects, displaying less accuracy in audio-visual stimuli detection during the incongruent rather than congruent trials. However, the experiments have yielded mixed results regarding the effects of reduced attentional resources on such detection tasks. While the group of younger participates appeared to be affected by the impact of cognitive load, this wasn’t revealed for most of the trial type conditions in the group of older individuals. Moreover, neither group showed a preference for the side on which the lateralized visual stimuli were displayed, suggesting the absence of any bias towards the left or the right visual field.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12608/10467