Ageing and switching ofthe focus ofattentionin working memory: Results from a modified

-Back task

Paul Verhaeghen and Chandramallika Basak

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA

We conducted two experiments using a modified version ofthe

-Back task. For youngeradults, there was an abrupt increase in reaction time ofabout 250ms in passing from



1 to



1, indicating a cost associated with switching ofthe focus ofattention within workingmemory. Response time costs remained constant over the range



2 to

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5. Accuracydeclined steadily over the full range of

(Experiment 1). Focus switch costs did not interactwith either working memory updating (Experiment 1), or global task switching (Experiment 2).There were no age differences in RT costs once general slowing was taken into account, butthere was a larger focus-switch-related accuracy cost in older adults than in younger adults. Noage sensitivity was found for either updating or global task switching. The results suggest(a)that focus switching is a cognitive primitive, distinct from task switching and updating, and(b) that focus switching shows a specific age-related deficit in the accuracy domain.

Adult age differences favouring the young have been demonstrated in a wide variety ofcog-nitive tasks. Such age-sensitive tasks include simple and choice reaction times, workingmemory tasks, tests ofepisodic memory, tests ofspatial and reasoning abilities, mental rota-tion, and visual search performance (for exhaustive reviews, see, e.g., Kausler, 1991; Salt-house, 1985, 1991). Given that almost all tasks that depend on fluid mental abilities showage-related decline, it seems likely that a small number offactors may be responsible forthese changes. Hence, much ofthe research on cognitive ageing has focused on the investi-gation ofhow age affects so-called cognitive primitives—that is, variables that influencemany aspects ofthe cognitive system without themselves being reducible to other psycho-logical constructs. One such primitive that has been researched extensively is processingspeed (Salthouse, 1991, 1996; Verhaeghen & Salthouse, 1997). Salthouse notes that infor-mation processing occurs at a given rate, and this rate slows with age. This theory has led tothe adoption ofage-related slowing as the null hypothesis to explain age-related differences

© 2005 The Experimental Psychology Societyhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/02724987.htmlDOI:10.1080/02724980443000241Correspondence should be addressed to Paul Verhaeghen or Chandramallika Basak, Department ofPsychology,430 Huntington Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244–2340, USA. Email: pverhaeg@psych.syr.edu or cbasak@mailbox.syr.eduThis research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (AG-16201). We thank John Cerella for his many useful comments. Marc Howard and Kara Bopp provided valuable additional comments.THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY2005, 58A(1), 134–154

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in cognitive tasks (e.g., Cerella, 1990; Faust, Balota, Spieler, & Ferraro, 1999; and Perfect &Maylor, 2000).More recently, attention has been drawn towards more process-specific accounts ofcog-nitive ageing, particularly focusing on basic executive processes operating in workingmemory. To date, ageing research has focused on three types ofcontrol process (see Miyake,Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000, for an empirically derived classification of control processes). The first is resistance to interference, also known as inhibitory control.This process has been a central explanatory construct in ageing theories since the 1990s (e.g.,Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999). The theory states that older adults havemore trouble inhibiting intrusive stimuli and intrusive thoughts. This presumed breakdownin resistance to interference will lead to mental clutter in working memory, thereby limitingits functional capacity and perhaps also its speed ofoperation. However, the finding that twoparadigmatic tasks that measure resistance to interference—namely Stroop interference andnegative priming—are not age sensitive once the effects ofbasic age differences in speed aretaken into account casts doubt on the viability ofthis explanation for age-related differencesin cognition (for meta-analyses, see Verhaeghen & De Meersman, 1998a, 1998b).A second suggestion for an age-sensitive control process has been the ability to coordi-nate distinct tasks or distinct processing streams. One ofthe paradigms used is dual-taskperformance (e.g., Hartley & Little, 1999; McDowd & Shaw, 2000), but the concept has alsobeen applied to working memory tasks (e.g., Mayr & Kliegl, 1993; Verhaeghen, Kliegl, &Mayr, 1997). Meta-analysis has supported the view that the age sensitivity ofdual-task per-formance cannot be explained simply in terms ofage-related slowing (Verhaeghen, Steitz,Sliwinski, & Cerella, 2003).During the late 1990s and early 2000s, an emergent third candidate for an age-sensitivecontrol task has been task switching (e.g., Mayr, Spieler, & Kliegl, 2001). Investigators haveused two different methods ofquantifying costs to performance when switches between tasksoccur. First, it is possible to compare mean reaction times (RTs) for blocks ofsuccessiveresponses within tasks given in isolation with mean RTs for blocks ofsuccessive responses inthe same task when the demand to switch to another is also present. This may be termed theglobal task-switching cost. It is thought to reflect the difficulty associated with maintainingand scheduling two different mental task sets. A second method is to examine performancewithin blocks where task switching occurs, comparing mean RT for trials in which taskswitching was actually required against mean RT for trials in which no switch was demanded.This local task-switching cost is held to reflect the demands ofthe executive process associ-ated with the actual switching. Meta-analysis (Wasylyshyn, Verhaeghen, & Sliwinski, 2003)has shown that global task-switching costs are age sensitive, but local costs are not.A bold summary ofthis all-too-briefreview ofthe literature on ageing and executivecontrol (see also Verhaeghen & Cerella, 2002) might be that age differences are present intasks that require the simultaneous maintenance oftwo distinct mental sets—for instance, indual-task performance and global task switching—but not in tasks that require selectionamong sets that are already loaded in working memory—for instance, in Stroop perfor-mance, in negative priming, and in local task switching. This interpretation ofthe literaturesuggests that the age-related deficit may not be located in the control processes per se, butmay rather be due to underlying difficulties with efficient maintenance or retrieval oftasksets when more than one set is involved.

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VERHAEGHEN AND BASAK

Focus switching: A new cognitive primitive?

Very recent work in cognitive psychology (Garavan, 1998; McElree, 2001; McElree &Dosher, 1989; Oberauer, 2002) has dealt with exactly these issues: storage in and retrievalfrom working memory in a single versus multiple item context. The starting point for theseefforts is the embedded-process account ofworking memory, best exemplified by the workofNelson Cowan. Cowan (1995, 2001) proposed a hierarchical two-tier structure for workingmemory, distinguishing a zone ofimmediate access, labelled the focus ofattention (typicallyconsidered to contain a magical number of4



1 elements), from a larger, activated portionoflong-term memory that holds information that is available but not immediately accessible.The recent challenge to Cowan’s model by Garavan (1998), McElree (2001), and Oberauer(2002) is that the focus ofattention is much narrower than previously assumed and, in fact,that it can hold no more than a single element at any given time.Perhaps the most compelling evidence for this narrow-focus view comes from McElree’s(2001) work with the identity judgement

-Back task. In this task, the participant is pre-sented with a sequence ofdigits, one at a time, and is required to press one oftwo keys toindicate whether the digit presented on the screen is identical or not to the digit presented

positions back in the sequence. McElree found that speed ofaccess was much faster for

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1 than for either

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2 or

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3, but that speeds ofaccess for

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2 and



3 wereidentical. The interpretation is that only a single element can be held in the focus ofatten-tion at any given time. When



1, the target must be retrieved from outside this atten-tional focus and moved into focal attention for processing. This operation (the focus switch)comes at a cost. In the RT domain, the cost associated with focus switching appears to be all-or-none—that is, the increase in reaction time is dependent on the presence ofa focusswitch, but independent offurther increases ofthe working memory load, otherwise RTsshould have increased from

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2 to

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Our experimental paradigm: Focus switching in anidentity judgement

-Back task

Given that focus switching appears to be a very fundamental process, implicated in any taskthat requires the processing ofmore than a single sequential stream ofitems, we hypothe-sized that it may well be the source ofthe age deficits observed in task switching (and alsoin dual tasking, although the latter possibility was not investigated here). Two experimentswere conducted to investigate this hypothesis. The first was designed to establish the exis-tence or absence ofage differences in focus-switching costs. The second was designed toexamine whether age deficits in focus switching, ifany, give rise to age deficits in other exec-utive processes associated with maintenance and retrieval in working memory. We investi-gated the relation between focus switching and global task switching, because they seem tobe closely related by definition. This comparison is also potentially crucial for cognitivetheory. Because age-related dissociations between processes indicate selective influence,such dissociation would provide strong evidence that the two processes are functionallyseparate (Sternberg, 2001).We based our task on McElree’s (2001) identity judgement

-Back task. McElree’s studyused a speed–accuracy methodology; we investigate RTs alone. The reason for this change