Selective Anticipation for Events in Old Age

When considering how momentary variations in attentional selectivity occur it is useful to distinguish between situations in which selectivity is controlled by external events (data-driven control) and other situations in which people use their previous experience to actively adjust their attentional selectivity from moment to moment (memory-driven control). In terms of this distinction Experiment 1 suggests that elderly people show preservation, or even enhancement, of data-driven control but loss of memory-driven control of selective attention. A general conclusion is that as people grow older they become more labile, and more subject to control by external events. Experiment 2 suggests that one possible reason may be that old subjects remember, analyse, and employ smaller samples of the recent past when they are computing what is most likely to happen next.