These results indicate that high education attenuates age-related decline and lower baseline performance incurred by low health status in persons younger than 50.

No abstract

Disproportionate costs of switching focal attention within working memory have been put forward as an explanation for age-related performance impairment on the n-back task. The lag (n) in the n-back task is confounded by memory load, however. In the current study, it was attempted to tackle this issue by introducing a two-digit 1-back condition. This condition was intended to bridge the gap between the conventional 1-back and 2-back conditions by increasing memory load, but not n. Twenty young (mean age = 22 years) and 20 older adults (mean age = 65 years) were subjected to this adapted n-back paradigm. The results corroborated earlier results in that, relative to the young participants, the older participants were disproportionately impaired in the 2-back condition relative to both the conventional one-digit and the two-digit 1-back conditions. In line with previous research, this interaction was only found in the accuracy scores, not in the reaction times. It was concluded that disproportionate costs of focus switching rather than memory load explain age-related impairment on the n-back task.

Older or lower educated individuals may be less able than younger or higher educated individuals to inhibit irrelevant speech when learning new visual information. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects of age (four groups), educational attainment (low or high), and verbal noise (spoken words or silence) on word-learning performance in 230 individuals aged 24 to 76 years. Performance was negatively affected by age, lower education, and irrelevant speech, but there were no interactions between age group and noise condition. In Experiment 2, we increased the difficulty of the word-learning task by using both irrelevant speech and a short interstimulus interval (2 or 0.5 s). Age differences became more pronounced as the result of the simultaneous occurrence of irrelevant speech and a short interstimulus interval. This suggests that older individuals may need more time than younger individuals to learn new information in noisy environments.