Distraction Can Reduce Age-Related Forgetting

Biss, Renée K.; Ngo, K. W. Joan; Hasher, Lynn; Campbell, Karen L.; Rowe, Glenn

doi:10.1177/0956797612457386

Cited by 60 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Previously, our group has argued that older adults can make beneficial use of distraction, and that implicit rehearsal can actually selectively benefit older adults (e.g. Healey et al, 2008;Biss et al, 2013)-from this perspective, the CRUNCH hypothesis is certainly plausible. Within the current experiment however, participants were instructed to ignore distractors -a goal that was better maintained by the young and old AM groups.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Timing is everything: Age differences in the cognitive control network are modulated by time of day.

Anderson¹,

Campbell²,

Amer³

et al. 2014

Psychology and Aging

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Current behavioral evidence suggests that attention regulation in humans varies with a circadian arousal rhythm that is influenced by age. However it is not known whether functional BOLD activation also varies with performance across the day in older adults. We used fMRI to compare activity in the control network in older adults tested in the morning and older and younger adults tested in the afternoon. Using a 1-back task with simultaneously presented stimuli (words superimposed on pictures), we show that older adults tested in the morning are not only more able to ignore the unattended stimulus than older adults in the afternoon, but activate similar cognitive control regions to young adults (rostral prefrontal and superior parietal cortex). We conclude that time of day modulates task-related fMRI signal in older adults and that age differences are reduced when older adults are tested at peak times of day. Keywordstime of day; circadian arousal; aging; attention; cognitive control; distraction; implicit memory; control network There are well known circadian fluctuations in cognitive alertness Yoon et al., 1999;Paradee et al., 2005;Blatter and Cajochen, 2007;Murray et al., 2009), fluctuations measurable with paper and pencil inventories highly correlated with physiological arousal (Horne and Ostberg, 1976;Roenneberg et al., 2003;Zavada et al., 2005). Additionally, there are age and individual differences in alertness patterns, such that the majority of older adults are shifted towards morningness, with younger adults falling into neutral and evening type ranges of alertness. Similar effects have also been demonstrated in animal studies which report robust age by synchrony interactions for arousal and memory Hasher, 1999, 2002 CIHR Author Manuscript CIHR Author Manuscript CIHR Author ManuscriptConcerning cognitive functioning, there is a substantial literature showing a synchrony effect (May et al., 1993;May and Hasher, 1998) such that performance, particularly on tasks requiring effortful (top-down) executive control or attention regulation are best performed at one's better times of day (May and Hasher, 1998;May, 1999;Yoon et al., 1999; Hasher et al., 2005;Ramírez et al., 2006Ramírez et al., , 2012Goldstein et al., 2007;Rowe et al., 2009; Hahn et al., 2012;Lehmann et al., 2013).Despite a rich behavioral literature, the influence of circadian rhythms and time of testing is largely unexplored in the neuroimaging literature and what research there is has focused on young adults (e.g. Marek et al., 2010) showing time of day differences in the ability to regulate strong but incorrect responses in the orienting attentional network -a division of the task-positive network that regulates where and when attention is directed in response to external cues (Schmidt et al., 2012).These findings are suggestive for young adults but an open and critical question is the impact of different times of testing for older adults -whose behavioral data shows substantially larger fluctuations, including in regulation of di...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Timing is everything: Age differences in the cognitive control network are modulated by time of day.

Anderson¹,

Campbell²,

Amer³

et al. 2014

Psychology and Aging

Self Cite

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“…An interesting follow-up to this study could examine the effect of DA at retrieval during an explicit task measuring transfer of distraction (e.g. Biss et al, 2013), as explicit memory may be more susceptible to effects of unconstrained retrieval. One of the goals of this research is to characterize the mechanism of the distraction transfer effect that has been shown to benefit memory in older adults (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In one study, young and older participants performed a selective attention task on pictures, ignoring superimposed distracter words, and older adults outperformed young adults on a subsequent word fragment completion task in which previous distracter words served as solutions to some fragments (Rowe et al, 2006). Older adults' implicit knowledge of distraction has now been shown to transfer to a variety of other test tasks including cued recall (Campbell, Hasher, & Thomas, 2010;Weeks, Biss, Murphy, & Hasher, 2016), prospective memory (Lourenço & Maylor, 2015), and free recall (Biss, Ngo, Hasher, Campbell, & Rowe, 2013), all without participants reporting any awareness of the relevance of the distracters. It is currently unclear whether the observed tacit transfer of distraction to later tasks is related to a lack of attentional control at encoding, retrieval, or both.…”

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confidence: 99%

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

Weeks

Hasher

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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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).

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“…Rabbitt concluded that older adults have greater difficulty ignoring irrelevant information compared with their younger counterparts and suggested based on some of his previous work that this may be due to a reduced efficiency of perceptual grouping. Although the way in which we carry out and describe research has certainly changed since then (e.g., in his paper, stimuli were stenciled onto cards that participants manually sorted, participants were referred to as Ss in the manuscript), the ability of older adults to ignore irrelevant information and both the hindrances, as well as the surprising advantages of them doing so is still a topic of much interest today (e.g., Biss, Ngo, Hasher, Campbell, & Rowe, 2013;Weeks & Hasher, 2014).…”

Section: Emergence Of Cognitive Aging Theory: the Mid-1960smentioning

confidence: 99%

50 Years of Cognitive Aging Theory

Anderson

Craik

2016

GERONB

110

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Objectives: The objectives of this Introduction to the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences special issue on "50 Years of Cognitive Aging Theory" are to provide a brief overview of cognitive aging research prior to 1965 and to highlight significant developments in cognitive aging theory over the last 50 years. Method: Historical and recent theories of cognitive aging were reviewed, with a particular focus on those not directly covered by the articles included in this special issue. Results: Prior to 1965, cognitive aging research was predominantly descriptive, identifying what aspects of intellectual functioning are affected in older compared with younger adults. Since the mid-1960s, there has been an increasing interest in how and why specific components of cognitive domains are differentially affected in aging and a growing focus on cognitive aging neuroscience. Discussion: Significant advances have taken place in our theoretical understanding of how and why certain components of cognitive functioning are or are not affected by aging. We also know much more now than we did 50 years ago about the underlying neural mechanisms of these changes. The next 50 years undoubtedly will bring new theories, as well as new tools (e.g., neuroimaging advances, neuromodulation, and technology), that will further our understanding of cognitive aging.

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Distraction Can Reduce Age-Related Forgetting

Cited by 60 publications

References 41 publications

Timing is everything: Age differences in the cognitive control network are modulated by time of day.

Timing is everything: Age differences in the cognitive control network are modulated by time of day.

Divided attention reduces resistance to distraction at encoding but not retrieval

50 Years of Cognitive Aging Theory

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