The Study On The Age Difference Of Emotion-related Dual-task Coordination Ability

Dual-task coordination is one of the sub-components of executive function,which refers to the ability to allocate attention between two tasks when they need to be completed at the same time.For example,watch the navigation while driving,or taking notes while listening to a teacher in class.Dual-task activities can be seen everywhere in daily life.With the demand of dual-task exceeding the individual’s attention ability,less attention will be paid to each task,leading to a decline in the performance of one or two tasks.With the increase of age,there will be changes in the psychological functions of the elderly,such as sensory perception,cognition,thinking,emotion and so on.From the perspective of cognitive dual-task,previous studies have discussed the differences in coordination ability between the young and the elderly and drawn different conclusions.However,little attention has been paid to the performance of the elderly in emotion-related dual tasks,which is obviously inconsistent with our life experience.Emotion recognition is one of the basic skills of normal social communication.In daily life,emotion recognition often occurs at the same time as other cognitive tasks,which requires us to coordinate the distribution of attention among different tasks.The discussion on the age difference in emotion-related dual-task can help us understand fully and understand the processing mechanism behind dual-task coordination in interpersonal communication with the elderly.It also helps to provide theoretical support for dual-task intervention training for the elderly.The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of task difficulty levels and emotional types on dual-task processing in different age groups,and to verify the correctness of resource model and dual-task deficit hypothesis in explaining processing interference and age differences of emotion-related dual-task.For this reason,32 younger adults(average age 19.59 ±1.13)and 30 elderly people(average age 64.19 ±4.9)were selected to participate in the three experimental tasks of this study.Experiment 1 investigated the age difference by facial recognition of happy,neutral and sad faces in different age groups under the condition of single task.It adopted 2(subject group: younger adults,older adults)× 3(emotional type: happy,neutral,sad)two-factor mixed experimental design.The dependent variables were the reaction time and accuracy of facial expression judgment on young and older adults.Experiment 2 investigated the age differences by different age groups completing multiple objects tracking with different difficulties under the condition of a single task.It adopted 2(subject group: younger adults,older adults)× 2(task difficulty: simple,difficult)two-factor mixed experimental design.The dependent variables are the reaction time and correct rate of the young and the old to complete the multiple objects tracking.Experiment 3 investigated the age difference between subjects in different age groups to complete two tasks under the condition of multiple objects tracking and facial expression recognition.It adopted 2(subjects: younger adults,older adults)× 3(emotional type: happy,neutral,sad)× 2(task difficulty: simple,difficult)three-factor mixed experimental design.The dependent variables are the reaction time and accuracy of multiple objects tracking for young and old,and the reaction time and accuracy of facial emotion recognition of young and old.At the same time,the age difference in dual-task costs of the two groups was also analyzed.The results show that,in experiment 1,younger adults are better than older adults in the accuracy and reaction time of facial expression recognition;In experiment 2,younger adults perform better than older adults in simple multi-target tracking task(one tracking target)and difficult multiple objects tracking(two tracking targets).In difficult multiple objects tracking,this age difference is more obvious.In experiment 3,it was found that when performing two tasks at the same time,the relationship between the facial emotion recognition task of the young and the elderly and the multiple objects tracking task was not consistent: when the main task(multiple objects tracking)was difficult,the correct rate of facial emotion recognition in the elderly was significantly lower than that when the main task was simple,while the facial expression recognition of young people was not affected by the difficulty of the task.At the same time,although the performance of the experimental task of the elderly is worse than that of the young under the condition of single / dual task,there is only a significant difference between the elderly and the young in the dual-task costs of multiple objects tracking.However,in the dual-task costs of facial expression recognition,the difference between the elderly and the young is not significant.Through the above experiments,the conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Whether young or old,the task interference in emotion-related dual tasks competing for the same resources is consistent with the resource model hypothesis.Compared with younger adults,older adults perform poorly in dual tasks,which may be due to their insufficient resource capacity.(2)After considering the age-related differences in the single-task baseline,the dual-task costs of the elderly conform to the dual-task deficit hypothesis.It shows that dual-task coordination is a unique ability and can be used as a reliable marker of cognitive decline in the elderly.(3)The cognitive task and emotional task of the elderly show different trends in dual-task costs,and the cognitive task performance decreases more obviously with age.