Older adults do not notice their names: A new twist to a classic attention task.

Abstract

Although older adults have lower working memory spans on average than young adults, we demonstrate in five experiments one way in which older adults paradoxically resemble higher-capacity young adults. Specifically, in a selective-listening task, older adults almost always failed to notice their names presented in an unattended channel. This is an exaggeration of what high-span young adults show, and the opposite of what low spans show. This striking finding in older adults remained significant after controlling for working memory span and for noticing their names in an attended channel. The findings were replicated when presentation rate was made slower and when the ear in which the unattended name was presented was controlled. These results point to an account of older adults’ performance involving not only an inhibition factor, which allows high-span young adults to suppress the channel to be ignored, but also an attentional capacity factor, with more unallocated capacity allowing low-span young adults to notice their names much more often than older adults with comparably low spans.

Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a cocktail party

“…Supporting this perspective, others have also observed that the level of processing applied to task-irrelevant stimuli can be affected by task demands ( Hohlfeld and Sommer, 2005 ; Pulvermüller et al, 2008 ). Moreover, individual differences in attentional abilities, and particularly the ability to process concurrent speech, have been attributed partially to working-memory capacity, a trait associated with the availability of more cognitive resources ( Beaman et al, 2007 ; Forster and Lavie, 2008 ; Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2014 ; Lambez et al, 2020 ) but cf. ( Elliott and Briganti, 2012 ).…”

The Dynamics of Attention Shifts Among Concurrent Speech in a Naturalistic Multi-speaker Virtual Environment

“…In the current study set, we did not collect additional personal data from participants which may have shed light on the source of the observed variability in gaze-patterns across individuals. However, based on previous literature, individual differences may stem from factors such as susceptibility to distraction (Ellermeier and Zimmer, 1997; Cowan et al, 2005; Avisar and Shalev, 2011; Bourel-Ponchel et al, 2011; Forster and Lavie, 2014; Hughes, 2014), working memory capacity (Conway et al, 2001; Kane and Engle, 2002; Tsuchida et al, 2012; Sörqvist et al, 2013; Hughes, 2014; Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2014; Wiemers and Redick, 2018) or personality traits (Rauthmann et al, 2012; Risko et al, 2012; Baranes et al, 2015; Hoppe et al, 2018). Additional dedicated research is needed to resolve the source of the individual differences observed here.…”

How Do Scientific Views Change? Notes From an Extended Adversarial Collaboration

“…N. Cowan was added to the collaboration because he had another relevant theory and was already working with R. H. Logie on several related projects, despite holding different views (a special journal issue on working memory introduced by Logie and Cowan, 2015, and a dissertation committee resulting in joint publications, Rhodes, Cowan, Hardman, & Logie, 2018; Rhodes, Cowan, Parra, & Logie, 2019; Rhodes, Parra, Cowan, & Logie, 2017). M. Naveh-Benjamin, who has worked with N. Cowan on working memory and aging (e.g., Cowan, Naveh-Benjamin, Kilb, & Saults, 2006; Gilchrist, Cowan, & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008; Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2014), was included on the grant proposal to help us enrich our comparison of the theories via research on cognitive aging.…”