Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

As we get older, we tend to suffer from age-related declines in attention, memory, and general cognitive ability. One of abilities most affected by old age is divided attention (performing two or more tasks concurrently). As divided attention plays a vital role in all our daily activities (for example, driving while maintaining a conversation, or using a cell-phone while crossing the street), the decline of this ability hinders the quality of life of older adults, and their sense of independence and autonomy. Thus, the goal of this project is to assess ways of improving divided attention in older adults. We will explore how different training programs influence participants' performance on a divided attention task. In addition, we will examine how differences in performance translate into brain activity in the electroencephalograph (EEG). EEG has many advantages, among them is giving us a detailed temporal view of all the minute changes occurring in the brain. Furthermore, our analysis will allow us to look for brain areas that are firing at the same frequency, indicating that the two regions share a given function. The participants will be tested on the divided attention task, after which they will undergo 2 weeks of specific training based on assigned groups. Finally, they will be tested on the task again. EEG measures will be taken while performing the task before and after training for comparison. The training groups are as follows: The single task training group (STT) will be trained on each of the divided attention tasks separately; the fixed attention training group (FAT) will be trained to assign equal attention to the two tasks; and the variable attention training group (VAT) will be trained to assign variable amounts of attention to the tasks.