COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE PERCEPTUAL INHIBITION BETWEEN CHILDREN AND OLDER ADULTS

COMESAÑA, ANA; VIDO, V.; RICHARD'S, MARÍA M

Psychology & Neuroscience

APA - Instituto Brasileiro de Neuropsicologia e Comportamento (IBNeC)

Lugar: Rio de Janeiro; Año: 2018 vol. 12 p. 65 - 77

PUBLISHED ONLINE FIRST. Perceptual inhibition is the executive process responsible for suppressing environmentalstimuli that are irrelevant to a complex task in progress. At present, there isnot enough evidence of the functioning changes that occur throughout life, nortasks to evaluate it in isolation. This study aims to: (a) compare theperformance of perceptual inhibition in children and older adults, consideringthe changes inherent to these stages, using a computerized task based on the ConjunctionVisual Search paradigm, and (b) describe the changes within each age groupbased on performance in the indicators of accuracy and reaction times. A sampleof 72 healthy participants was assessed (36 children between 6 to 9 years old,and 36 adults over 60 years old). The results showed statistically significantdifferences in accuracy for the four conditions of the task in favor of thegroup of older adults. For the reaction times, only significant differences inthe condition of 32 distracters were found, being faster in the group ofchildren. There are marked trends in favor of the hypothesis of differentialperformance within each age group. These results provide knowledge in favor ofchanges in perceptual inhibition according to the life stage. Likewise, theyallow showing empirical evidence about intra and inter-group differences in theefficiency of inhibitory functioning.