Abstract
Aging is associated with declines in attention, but also with a tendency to attend to emotionally positive information. When attention is engaged in an ongoing task, an unexpected stimulus may not be detected, resulting in inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness increases in older age, due to reduced attentional capacity. In the present study, age differences in inattentional blindness to emotional unexpected stimulus were investigated. Younger and older adults completed an inattentional blindness task in which a positive and a negative unexpected stimulus appeared concurrently while attention was engaged in a counting task. Overall, the findings replicated previous results showing greater inattentional blindness for older adults. While both groups were more likely to detect the positive stimulus, this tendency was stronger in older adults. The participants who detected only the positive stimulus were more likely to be the older ones. There were no group differences in the detection of the negative stimulus. The results are partially consistent with age-related positivity effect, demonstrating that older adults’ positive mood affects their attentional filter. The results emphasize the role of emotional and motivational changes in older age and show that higher inattentional blindness for older adults cannot solely be explained by reductions in attentional capacity.
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Availability of Data
The data file generated and analysed during the current study are available in OSF repository, [https://osf.io/vc8qz/?view_only=3e1c874fe08842db8e5caf34f0127c02].
Code Availability
The displays that were used in the current study can be viewed in OSF repository, [https://osf.io/vc8qz/?view_only=3e1c874fe08842db8e5caf34f0127c02].
Notes
Eighty-five younger adults (53 females, 18-37 years old, M = 29.09, SD = 3.254) and 26 older adults (19 females, 60-79 years old, M = 65.67, SD = 4.73) participated in the pilot study.
Note that the four younger participants who detected both the negative and the positive US can be included in the group who detected the negative US (and of course in the group who detected the positive US). If we include those four participants in the group who detected the negative US, Fisher’s exact test showed that the difference between the younger and older adults reaches significance, p < .05, ɸ = .33.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Aysu Mutlutürk for her comments about the data analysis and Işıl Şanusoğlu for collecting part of the data. Special thanks are extended to the participants who dedicated their time to this project.
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Both authors contributed equally to the conceptualization, the design of the study and the analyses of the data, as well as to the interpretation of the results and to manuscript preparation.
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Tunç, R., Ikier, S. Age differences in Inattentional blindness to emotional stimulus. Curr Psychol 42, 8327–8334 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02159-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02159-8