28 Nov Older Brain Less Able To Filter Out Irrelevant Information
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Prof. Takeo Watanabe
The Fred M. Seed Professor
Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences
Brown University
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Prof. Watanabe: In the current study also supported by NIH, we obtained surprising results. That is, older people learn what younger people do not learn. We asked subjects to do a letter identification task at the center of a screen while another stimulus was presented in the background. This background stimulus contained a group of dots moving in one direction with noises and had nothing to do with the task. Therefore the motion was task-irrelevant. If the motion is clearly perceived, learning on the motion as task-irrelevant did not occur when subjects were college students. However, older people ended up increasing sensitivity to and, therefore learned, such task-irrelevant motion. This might sound as if the older brain worked better than the younger brain in visual perceptual learning. However, that may not be the case. Our brain capacity is limited. If our brain learned items that are not relevant to a given task and therefore are unimportant to us, there would be the risk of such unimportant items replacing important information which has already existed in the brain. Thus, learning of task-irrelevant and therefore unnecessary information could be harmful and decrease the efficiency of learning of what is important.
Medical Research: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?
Prof. Watanabe: At least as long as visual learning is concerned, in some cases, less efficiency of learning is not due to the possibility that the older brain is not plastic, but due to the fact that older people have lower ability of filtering out task-irrelevant and trivial information.
Medical Research:What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?
Prof. Watanabe: It is important to develop an effective training method to make older people to learn not to pay attention to task-irrelevant items.
Citation:
Age-related declines of stability in visual perception learning
Current Biology
Li-Hung Chang, Kazuhisa Shibata, George J. Andersen, Yuka Sasaki Takeo Watanabe
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.041
Last Updated on November 28, 2014 by Marie Benz MD FAAD