Spontaneous Distractor Reactivation With Age: Evidence for Bound Target-Distractor Representations in Memory.

Reduced attentional control with age is associated with the processing and maintenance of task-irrelevant information in memory. Yet the nature of these memory representations remains unclear. We present evidence that, relative to younger adults (n = 48), older adults (n = 48) both (a) store simultaneously presented target and irrelevant information as rich, bound memory representations and (b) spontaneously reactivate irrelevant information when presented with previously associated targets. In a three-stage implicit reactivation paradigm, re-presenting a target picture that was previously paired with a distractor word spontaneously reactivated the previously associated word, making it become more accessible than an unreactivated distractor word in a subsequent implicit memory task. The accessibility of reactivated words, indexed by priming, was also greater than the degree of distractor priming shown by older adults in a control condition (n = 48). Thus, reduced attentional control influences the processing and representation of incoming information.

Holding On to the Past: Older Adults Show Lingering Neural Activation of No-Longer-Relevant Items in Working Memory.

Goal-relevant information can be maintained in working memory over a brief delay interval to guide an upcoming decision. There is also evidence suggesting the existence of a complementary process: namely, the ability to suppress information that is no longer relevant to ongoing task goals. Moreover, this ability to suppress or inhibit irrelevant information appears to decline with age. In this study, we compared younger and older adults undergoing fMRI on a working memory task designed to address whether the modulation of neural representations of relevant and no-longer-relevant items during a delay interval is related to age and overall task performance. Following from the theoretical predictions of the inhibitory deficit hypothesis of aging, we hypothesized that older adults would show higher activation of no-longer-relevant items during a retention delay compared to young adults and that higher activation of these no-longer-relevant items would predict worse recognition memory accuracy for relevant items. Our results support this prediction and more generally demonstrate the importance of goal-driven modulation of neural activity in successful working memory maintenance. Furthermore, we showed that the largest age differences in the regulation of category-specific pattern activity during working memory maintenance were seen throughout the medial temporal lobe and prominently in the hippocampus, further establishing the importance of "long-term memory" retrieval mechanisms in the context of high-load working memory tasks that place large demands on attentional selection mechanisms.

Leveraging older adults' susceptibility to distraction to improve memory for face-name associations.

Forgetting people's names is a common memory complaint among older adults and one that is consistent with experimental evidence of age-related decline in memory for face-name associations. Despite this difficulty intentionally forming face-name associations, a recent study demonstrated that older adults hyperbind distracting names and attended faces, which produces better learning of these face-name pairs when they reappear on a memory test (Weeks, Biss, Murphy, & Hasher, 2016). The current study explored whether this effect could be leveraged as an intervention to reduce older adults' forgetting of face-name associations, using a method previously shown to improve older adults' retention of a word list (Biss, Ngo, Hasher, Campbell, & Rowe, 2013). Twenty-five younger and 32 older adults studied 24 face-name pairs and were tested via immediate and delayed memory tests. During the 30-min retention interval, 10 of the face-name pairs reoccurred as distraction in an ostensibly unrelated face-judgment task, providing an opportunity to implicitly rehearse these pairs. Older adults showed reduced forgetting of repeated face-name pairs as well as improved recollection. Younger adults showed no reliable benefit. These findings indicate that useful distraction benefits older adults' memory for face-name associations, suggesting its potential utility as a memory intervention technique. (PsycINFO Database Record

Older adults encode more, not less: evidence for age-related attentional broadening.

Previous work has shown that older adults attend to and implicitly remember more distracting information than young adults; however, it is unknown whether they show a corresponding decrease in implicit memory for targets in the presence of distracters. Using implicit memory tests, we asked whether older adults show a tradeoff in memory between targets and distracters. Here, young and older adults performed a selective attention task in which they were instructed to attend to target pictures and ignore superimposed distracter words. We measured priming for distracter words using fragment completion and for target pictures using naming time. Older adults showed greater priming for distracting words compared to young adults, but equivalent priming for target pictures. These results suggest that older adults have a broader attentional scope than young adults, encompassing both relevant and irrelevant information.

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval.

Older adults show implicit memory for previously seen distraction, an effect attributed to poor attentional control. It is unclear whether this effect results from lack of control over encoding during the distraction task, lack of retrieval constraint during the test task, or both. In the present study, we simulated poor distraction control in young adults using divided attention at encoding, at retrieval, at both times, or not at all. The encoding task was a 1-back task on pictures with distracting superimposed letter strings, some of which were words. The retrieval task was a word fragment completion task testing implicit memory for the distracting words. Attention was divided using an auditory odd digit detection task. Dividing attention at encoding, but not at retrieval, resulted in significant priming for distraction, which suggests that control over encoding processes is a primary determinant of distraction transfer in populations with low inhibitory control (e.g. older adults).

Face-name learning in older adults: a benefit of hyper-binding.

Difficulty remembering faces and corresponding names is a hallmark of cognitive aging, as is increased susceptibility to distraction. Given evidence that older adults spontaneously encode relationships between target pictures and simultaneously occurring distractors (a hyper-binding phenomenon), we asked whether memory for face-name pairs could be improved through prior exposure to faces presented with distractor names. In three experiments, young and older adults performed a selective attention task on faces while ignoring superimposed names. After a delay, they learned and were tested on face-name pairs that were either maintained or rearranged from the initial task but were not told of the connection between tasks. In each experiment, older but not younger participants showed better memory for maintained than for rearranged pairs, indicating that older adults' natural propensity to tacitly encode and bind relevant and irrelevant information can be employed to aid face-name memory performance.

The disruptive - and beneficial - effects of distraction on older adults' cognitive performance.

Older adults' decreased ability to inhibit irrelevant information makes them especially susceptible to the negative effects of simultaneously occurring distraction. For example, older adults are more likely than young adults to process distraction presented during a task, which can result in delayed response times, decreased reading comprehension, disrupted problem solving, and reduced memory for target information. However, there is also some evidence that the tendency to process distraction can actually facilitate older adults' performance when the distraction is congruent with the target information. For example, congruent distraction can speed response times, increase reading comprehension, benefit problem solving, and reduce forgetting in older adults. We review data showing that incongruent distraction can harm older adults' performance, as well as evidence suggesting that congruent distraction can play a supportive role for older adults by facilitating processing of target information. Potential applications of distraction processing are also discussed.

Happily distracted: mood and a benefit of attention dysregulation in older adults.

Positive mood states are believed to broaden the focus of attention in younger adults, but it is unclear whether the same is true for older adults. Here we examined one consequence of broader attention that has been shown in young adults: that memory for distraction is greater for those in a positive mood. In the current study, positive and neutral moods were induced in older adults (M = 67.9) prior to a 1-back task in which participants were instructed to attend to relevant pictures and ignore distracting words. Following a 10-min filled interval, participants performed a word fragment completion task that tested implicit memory for the distracting words from the 1-back task. Older adults in the positive mood group showed greater implicit memory for previous distraction compared to those in the neutral mood group. These findings suggest that affect influences the ability to regulate attention in a similar manner for younger and older adults.