ABSTRACT

Assessment of cognitive impairments is a vital part of clinical practice. Cancellation (visual search) and line bisection are commonly used tasks to assess visuospatial attention. Despite the fact visuospatial attention is engaged in both near (within reach) and far-space (out of reach), most studies have been conducted in near-space alone. Moreover, despite their use in clinical practice, it is unclear whether cancellation and bisection tasks are related. Here, we investigated the impact of aging on cancellation and line bisection performance in far-space in a large healthy sample. We provide preliminary age-graded norms for assessing visuospatial attention in far-space calculated from a sample of 179 healthy adults, between the ages of 18–94 (mean age = 49.29). Cancellation and line bisection were presented on a large screen in far-space and completed using a wireless remote. Aging was accompanied by longer task duration for both tasks, slower search speed and poorer quality of search. However, there was no significant effect of aging on line bisection error. There was a significant correlation between the two tasks in that longer task duration in line bisection was associated with slower search speed and poorer quality of search. Overall, participants presented a leftward bias during cancellation and line bisection akin to pseudoneglect. Moreover, we found that irrespective of age, search speed was faster in males than females. We offer novel evidence that performance on cancellation and line bisection tasks are related to one another in far-space, but are also sensitive to age-related decline, and even sex differences.

摘要

认知障碍的评估是临床实践的重要组成部分。取消（视觉搜索）和线平分是评估视觉空间注意力的常用任务。尽管视觉空间注意力同时涉及近空间（触手可及）和远空间（触手可及），但大多数研究都是仅在近空间中进行的。此外，尽管它们在临床实践中得到使用，但尚不清楚取消任务和平分任务是否相关。在这里，我们在一个大型健康样本中研究了老化对远空间消除和线平分性能的影响。我们提供了初步的年龄分级标准，用于评估远空间的视觉空间注意力，该标准是根据 179 名年龄在 18-94 岁之间的健康成年人样本计算得出的（平均年龄 = 49.29）。取消和线平分显示在远太空的大屏幕上，并使用无线遥控器完成。老化伴随着两项任务的任务持续时间较长、搜索速度较慢和搜索质量较差。然而，老化对线平分误差没有显着影响。这两个任务之间存在显着的相关性，因为线平分中较长的任务持续时间与较慢的搜索速度和较差的搜索质量相关。总体而言，参与者在取消和线平分期间表现出类似于假忽略的向左偏差。此外，我们发现，无论年龄大小，男性的搜索速度都快于女性。我们提供了新的证据，表明在远空间中，取消任务和线平分任务的性能是相互关联的，