Aging, distraction, and the benefits of predictable location.

Abstract

Three experiments examined the impact on reading time for younger and older adults in the absence vs. presence of distraction (marked by font type) in either fixed predictable locations (Experiments 1 and 2) or unpredictable locations (Experiment 3). Consistent with earlier work (S. L. Connelly, L. Hasher, & R. T. Zacks, 1991), older adults were markedly disrupted, relative to young adults, when distraction was present in unpredictable locations. When the location of distraction was fixed, however, the very large disadvantage that older adults otherwise experienced (slowed by as much as 46 s) diminished substantially (to as little as 2 s). Fixed location also eliminated the relatedness effect, by which older adults are especially susceptible to distraction from meaningfully related material.

Attentional disregulation: A benefit for implicit memory.

“…Existing research demonstrates the downside of age-related declines in attentional regulation, such as slower search times, and reduced accuracy on a wide range of tasks when distraction is present (e.g., Carlson et al, 1995;Winocur & Moscovitch, 1983). As well, some work suggests that attentional regulation varies with circadian arousal patterns across the day (e.g., May, 1999), with greater disruption from concurrent distraction at off peak times of day.…”

“…This is particularly notable in cognitive gerontology, in part because a substantial literature suggests that older adults are more easily distracted by concurrently presented, but irrelevant, information than are younger adults (e.g., Madden & Langley, 2003; but see Winocur & Moscovitch, 1983). Older adults' susceptibility to concurrent and recently relevant distraction impairs performance on a variety of tasks including speech comprehension and reading (Carlson, Hasher, Zacks, & Connelly, 1995;Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002), attention tasks such as Stroop (e.g., Cohn, Dustman, & Bradford, 1984), visual search (Scialfa, Esau, & Joffe, 1998) and flanker tasks (e.g., Zeef, Sonke, Kok, Buiten, & Kenemans, 1996), and both explicit and implicit memory tasks (Hartman & Hasher, 1991). Taken together, then, these findings suggest that older adults often have difficulty limiting the focus of their attention to target material, and that they may be processing, at some level at least, both concurrently relevant and irrelevant information.…”

Inhibitory control over the present and the past

“…Both younger and older adults are slower to read a passage of text that has distracting words scattered throughout it than they are to read a control passage without such distraction. However, older adults are more impaired by the distractors than are young adults, and older but not younger adults are further slowed if the distractor words are related to the passage (Carlson, Hasher, Connelly, & Zacks, 1995;Connelly, Hasher, & Zacks, 1991;Duchek, Balota, & Thessing, 1998;Dywan & Murphy, 1996;Li, Hasher, Jonas, Rahhal, & May, 1999) (see Figure 1). As with the target-search tasks described earlier, age diVerences on the reading-with-distractio n task are greatly reduced if the distractors appear in xed or predictable locations (Carlson et al, 1995).…”

Age-related effects on speech production: A review

“…Assuming that the processes involved in attending to a to-be-named object (i.e., covert orienting and visual filtering) are intact as long as the location of the object is predictable (Carlson, Hasher, Connelly, & Zacks, 1995;Kramer & Weber, 1999; for a review, see Plude, Enns, & Brodeur, 1994), older adults may need more time than young adults to recognise the object, to activate the corresponding lexical concept, to select the corresponding lemma, to retrieve the phonological form of the word, or to articulate the word. Similarly, older adults may need more time to activate the conceptual and lexical processes involved in the naming of definitions.…”