Effect of Semantic Priming for Wide Attention Focus on Visuomotor Decision-making Task in Young and Older Non-professional Drivers

Abstract

The study was aimed at estimating the semantic priming effect for wide attention focus on subjects response time (RT) in a decision-making visuomotor hand movement task (VMHT) performed in traffic scenarios for non-professional driver’s license tests. The priming was based on modified scrambled sentence task. Traffic scenarios were displayed either on whole screen or within the central 25% of the screen. VMHT was presented: 1) immediately after priming; 2) after primed in the same way adaptation of reactive visual saccade; 3) without priming and saccade adaptation. Thirty young and thirty older subjects took part in the study as they were divided equally into three groups with respect to the three conditions: 1) YP and OP (a group where the traffic test is performed before the sacccade adaptation); 2) YS and OS (after the saccade adaptation); 3) YC and OC (control group). The outcomes established that RTs of both YP and OP groups are higher while RTs of YS and OS groups are lower in comparison with the control groups. RTs of all older groups were significantly longer than those of the younger groups. Longer RTs were found with respect to large pictures than to small pictures. These results suggest that semantic priming has a rather negative effect on decision-making VMHT performance because priming with scrambled sentences also involves a decision-making process. Therefore, they both need similar cognitive resources of which probably VMHT is deprived by the preceding priming and as consequence its perceptual realization is delayed. The study suggests that priming and visuomotor performance are related and the effect of the former on the latter depends on which cognitive resources they need.