Aging and visual search: automatic and controlled attentional bias to threat faces.
Using a visual search paradigm, we investigated how age affected attentional bias to emotional facial expressions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants searched for a discrepant facial expression in a matrix of otherwise homogeneous faces. Both younger and older adults showed a more effective search when the discrepant face was angry rather than happy or neutral. However, when the angry faces served as non-target distractors, younger adults' search was less effective than happy or neutral distractor conditions. In contrast, older adults showed a more efficient search with angry distractors than happy or neutral distractors, indicating that older adults were better able to inhibit angry facial expressions. In Experiment 3, we found that even a top-down search goal could not override the angry face superiority effect in guiding attention. In addition, RT distribution analyses supported that both younger and older adults performed the top-down angry face search qualitatively differently from the top-down happy face search. The current research indicates that threat face processing involves automatic attentional shift and a controlled attentional process. The current results suggest that age only influenced the controlled attentional process.
Hahn
Sowon
S
Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma, 455 West Lindsey St., Norman, OK 73019, USA. sowon@ou.edu
Carlson
Curt
C
Singer
Shawn
S
Gronlund
Scott D
SD
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001332:Automatism; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*