Aging and a benefit of distractibility.
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.
Kim
Sunghan
S
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. shkim@psych.utoronto.ca
Rasher
Lynn
L
Zacks
Rose T
RT
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time; D014825:Vocabulary
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