A new look at aging and performance in the antisaccade task: The impact of response selection

Aged adults respond more slowly and less accurately in the antisaccade task, in which a saccade away from a visual stimulus is required. This decreased performance has been attributed to a decline in the ability to inhibit prepotent responses with age. Considering that antisaccades also involve response selection, the present experiment investigated the contribution of inhibition and response selection. Young and aged adults were compared between conditions that required varying percentages of prosaccades, antisaccades, and no-go trials. The comparison between no-go (inhibition of a prosaccade) and antisaccade trials (inhibition of a prosaccade and selection of an antisaccade) showed significantly worse performance in the antisaccade task, especially for the older group, suggesting that they failed to select the antisaccade in a situation in which a competing, prepotent response is available. The impact of this response selection failure was underlined by an equivalent ability of both groups to impose inhibition.