Aging and a Benefit of Distractibility

Overview

Journal Psychon Bull Rev

Specialty Psychology

Date 2007 Aug 19

PMID 17694917

Citations 40

Authors

Sunghan Kim

Lynn Rasher

Rose T Zacks

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Under instructions to ignore distraction, younger and older adults read passages with interspersed distracting words. Some of the distractors served as solutions to a subsequent set of verbal problems in which three weakly related words could be related by retrieving a missing fourth word (i.e., the Remote Associates Test [RAT]; Mednick, 1962). Older adults showed significant priming from the distraction, whereas younger adults did not. In this study, we present a case in which age-related reductions in attentional control over information that was not initially relevant can actually lead to superior performance for older adults. The RAT materials may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Citing Articles

Memory, aging and the brain: Old findings and current issues.

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The benefits of immature cognitive control: How distributed attention guards against learning traps.

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Effects of the presence of a cell phone and exposure to natural environments on remote associates task performance.

Liu W, Dempo A, Kimura T, Kawashima T, Shinohara K Sci Rep. 2022; 12(1):9507.

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