Learning to attend: the influence of gain vs. loss on attention capture for younger and older adults

The study was conducted in the Attention & Performance Lab.Previous studies have shown that both younger and older adults exhibit similar brain activity while anticipating monetary gain but older adults exhibit less brain activity comparing to younger adults while anticipating monetary loss. In Anderson et al.’s (2011) study, they found that visual search was slower with a salient, task-irrelevant distractor previously associated with high reward than with an equally salient distractor previously associated with a smaller reward. We aim to determine if this modulation also occurs in a spatial cuing paradigm. In addition to this, we will examine effects of loss (low and high) between younger and older adults