Compared with younger adults, older adults tend to favor positive information more than negative information in their attention and memory. This "positivity effect" has been observed in various paradigms, but at which stage it impacts cognitive processing and how it influences processing other stimuli appearing around the same time remains unclear. Across 4 experiments, we examined how older adults prioritize emotional information in early attention. Both younger and older adults demonstrated emotion-induced blindness-identifying targets in a rapid serial display of pictures with less accuracy after emotional compared with neutral distractors-but older adults demonstrated a positivity bias at this early attentional level. Moreover, the bias toward positive but not negative information in older adults was reduced when they had a working memory load. These results suggest that a selective bias toward positive, but not negative, information occurs early in visual processing, and the bias relies on cognitive control resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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情绪诱发的失明的年龄差异：正面关注中的积极影响。

与年轻人相比，老年人在注意力和记忆力上倾向于正面信息多于负面信息。在各种范式中都可以观察到这种“积极效应”，但是在哪个阶段它会影响认知过程，以及它如何影响大约在同一时间出现的其他刺激的过程。在4个实验中，我们检查了老年人如何在早期关注中优先考虑情绪信息。与中性干扰物相比，年轻人和老年人在情绪快速识别后的图片快速连续显示中均表现出情绪诱发的盲目识别目标，但老年人在这一早期注意水平上表现出积极性偏见。此外，当他们的工作记忆负荷很大时，他们对正信息而非负信息的偏见就会减少。这些结果表明，在视觉处理的早期，对阳性信息（而非阴性信息）的选择性偏见发生了，并且偏见依赖于认知控制资源。（PsycINFO数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。