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Journal Article

Citation

Dumas JA, Hartman M. Aging Neuropsychol. Cogn. 2007; 1-28.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit, University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, VT, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13825580701534601

PMID

17851982

Abstract

This study examined age differences in working memory using a delayed-matching-to-sample (DMTS) task. Based on the inhibitory decline hypothesis, which posits that older adults are more susceptible to interference, age differences were expected to be greater for older adults when irrelevant information was present during encoding. Two experiments tested both the access and deletion functions of inhibition. In both experiments, performance was equated for older and younger participants on a no-interference version of the DMTS task to control for age differences in encoding information into working memory. Results consistently showed equivalent effects of distraction for older and younger adults regardless of the difficulty of the perceptual discrimination of targets and distractors, the degree of processing of the distractors, or the semantic relationship between targets and distractors. These results support theories that propose age differences in encoding to explain age differences in working memory, and are inconsistent with theories that propose that older adults are more susceptible to interference than younger adults.


Keywords: Driver distraction


Language: en

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