Ageing, visibility and ignoring

Most of us are familiar with the decline in visual perception that comes with age. What is more surprising is that we also become worse at ignoring distractions. This ability to orient our minds to the most pressing inputs and exclude irrelevant information is vital to be able to function in our jobs, homes and leisure. Research has often focused on the consequences of attention to objects or locations. Recent findings, however, suggest that irrelevant information is not simply left unattended but under some conditions must be purposefully filtered out: a process of actively ignoring.In this project I will examine the functional and neural mechanisms of actively ignoring in young and old participants. I will investigate whether the decrease in the visibility of images that happens with ageing interacts with people’s capacity to actively ignore. Somewhat counter-intuitively, recent results have suggested that less visible images are more difficult to actively ignore. This project will use both brain imaging techniques (fMRI) and studies of behaviour to investigate whether ageing is associated with a change in strategy, a decline in perceptual abilities or a more general decline in abilities.