Chapter 22 Cognitive aging and increased distractibility: Costs and potential benefits
Section snippets
On processing speed
Older adults are substantially slower than younger adults on simple measures of processing speed such as the rate at which a participant can compare two strings of letters and determine whether they are identical or not. Performance on these tasks accounts for a considerable proportion of age-related variance on memory tasks such as free recall and paired associate learning, prompting the claim that reduced processing speed is a major cause of age-related cognitive impairments (see Salthouse,
Fortuitous effects of distraction
To this point we have discussed the negative consequences associated with being distracted by irrelevant information. However, outside the laboratory the delineation between irrelevant and relevant is often fuzzy and tends to change unpredictably. For example, if you are reading a journal article with the aim of finding evidence to support a claim you want to make in a paper you are writing, any data or arguments not directly relevant to your claim could be considered distraction that should be
Conclusion
Aging is associated with a decrease in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information. As a result, older adults are less able to regulate their attention and they end up processing more distracting information than younger adults. In this chapter, we have discussed some of the deleterious effects that increased susceptibility to distraction can have on older adults’ cognitive performance. Inadvertently attending to irrelevant information can slow down processing on simple cognitive tasks (
Acknowledgments
Much of the research reviewed here was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging (R37 AGO4306). We thank all of the people who contributed to the various projects.
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