We investigated the effect of age and time of testing on the ability to control attention, and addressed the possibility that older adults' susceptibility to distraction may sometimes facilitate performance on a later cognitive task. Using a modification of Rees et al. (1999), participants made same/different judgements on line-drawings superimposed with task-irrelevant letter strings. Memory for the distractors was subsequently tested using an implicit memory task. Both older and younger adults demonstrated greater memory for distractors at nonoptimal than at optimal times of day; however, older adults showed considerably better memory for the distractors than did younger adults.