ArticlePsychology and aging2022
A multimodal analysis of sustained attention in younger and older adults.
Article in Psychology and aging, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lapses of attention.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Are the correlates of mind wandering consistent across younger and older adults?Psychological research · 2026Article
- Association of physical activity and rest-activity rhythm with sustained attention and melatonin among community-dwelling older adults.European review of aging and physical activity : official journal of the European Group for Research into Elderly and Physical Activity · 2026Article
- Forgetting or blanking? Evaluating the role of a forgot option in a thought sampling method for mind blanking research.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Mapping the Relationship Between Core Executive Functions and Mind Wandering in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Review
- Artificial Intelligence-Based Computerized Digit Vigilance Test in Community-Dwelling Older Adults: Development and Validation Study.JMIR medical informatics · 2025Article
- Age-related differences in the relationship between sustained attention and associative memory and Memory-Guided inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Limited Evidence to Review-Is There an Association Between Cognition and Upper Extremity Motor Reaction Time in Older Adults?NeuroSci · 2025Review
- Top-down attention and Alzheimer's pathology affect cortical selectivity during learning, influencing episodic memory in older adults.Science advances · 2025Article
- Memory selectivity in younger and older adults: The role of conative factors in value-directed remembering.Psychology and aging · 2025Article
- Using objective and subjective measures of mind wandering to predict progression to development of cognitive impairment and test associations with Alzheimer disease biomarkers.Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology · 2025Article
- Arousal and sustained attention fluctuate differently with respiration in younger and older adults.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Age differences in motivation drive performance during the sustained attention to response task.PloS one · 2025Article
- Mind-wandering when studying valuable information: The roles of age, dispositional traits, and contextual factors.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in mind-wandering in older adulthood.Psychology and aging · 2024Article
- Age-Related Differences in Mind Wandering: The Role of Emotional Valence.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Age-related cognitive decline has been attributed to processing speed differences, as well as differences in executive control and response inhibition. However, recent research has shown that healthy older adults have intact, if not superior, sustained attention abilities compared to younger adults. The present study used a combination of reaction time (RT), thought probes, and pupillometry to measure sustained attention in samples of younger and older adults. The RT data revealed that, while slightly slower overall, older adults sustained their attention to the task better than younger adults, and did not show a vigilance decrement. Older adults also reported fewer instances of task-unrelated thoughts and reported feeling more motivated and alert than younger adults, despite finding the task more demanding. Additionally, older adults showed larger, albeit later-peaking, task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs), corroborating the behavioral and self-report data. Finally, older adults did not show a shallowing of TEPRs across time, corroborating the finding that their RTs also did not change across time. The present findings are interpreted in light of processing speed theory, resource-depletion theories of vigilance, and recent neurological theories of cognitive aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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