An investigation of age differences in divided attention and intrahemispheric competition
| dc.contributor.author | Penner, Ronald Steven | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Costa, Louis | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-03-27T22:07:56Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-03-27T22:07:56Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1981 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Psychology | |
| dc.description.abstract | Following several pi lot experiments on intrahemispheric competition a primary experiment was conducted to investigate adult age differences in divided attention and intrahemispheric competition. Right handed subjects performed a repetitive finger tapping task, with the right or left index finger, either alone or with a concurrent verbal task (Tongue Twisters, Verbal Fluency, or Sentence Repetition). All subjects were exposed to each of the three concurrent tasks with one right and one left hand trial within each concurrent task condition, and task and hand orders were counterbalanced. The subjects were instructed to divide their attention equally between the two tasks in concurrent task conditions. There were four control trials of single task tapping with each hand, and these trials were evenly spaced throughout the experiment from beginning to end. All trials were of 20 seconds duration with 30 second inter-trial intervals. Subjects tapped faster with the right than the left hand and young subjects tapped faster than older subjects. Tapping performance improved with practice, and improvement was similar for both hands and for each age group. All three verbal tasks interfered with concurrent finger tapping performance. The Tongue Twister task was associated with the greatest degree of interference while Verbal Fluency and Sentence Repetition were substantially less disrupting. Age differences in overall degree of interference were found for the Verbal Fluency and Sentence Repetition tasks. Patterns of intrahemispheric competition (greater right than left decline from baseline tapping) were found for each task, with Sentence Repetition providing the most powerful and consistent effects. There was a tendency for the Tongue Twister task to result in bilateral yet somewhat asymmetric tapping decrement. The post hoc establishment of a laterality criterion based on single task tapping performance resulted in more powerful findings of intrahemispheric competition, particularly for the Verbal Fluency condition. Age differences in intrahemispheric competition were not found for any of the concurrent task conditions. The results were discussed in terms of information processing and Kinsbourne's functional cerebral distance model. It was concluded that the elderly may require a greater portion of processing capacity to be allocated for the organization of the division of attention, and that intrahemispheric competition may be a stable phenomenon which does not represent a particular problem area in the elderly. | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/21698 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | |
| dc.title | An investigation of age differences in divided attention and intrahemispheric competition | |
| dc.type | Thesis |