Abstract
Healthy aging is associated with decline in the ability to maintain visual information in working memory (WM). We examined whether this decline can be explained by decreases in the ability to filter distraction during encoding or to ignore distraction during memory maintenance. Distraction consisted of irrelevant objects (Exp. 1) or irrelevant features of an object (Exp. 2). In Experiment 1, participants completed a spatial WM task requiring remembering locations on a grid. During encoding or during maintenance, irrelevant distractor positions were presented. In Experiment 2, participants encoded either single-feature (colors or orientations) or multifeature objects (colored triangles) and later reproduced one of these features using a continuous scale. In multifeature blocks, a precue appeared before encoding or a retrocue appeared during memory maintenance indicating with 100% certainty to the to-be-tested feature, thereby enabling filtering and ignoring of the irrelevant (not-cued) feature, respectively. There were no age-related deficits in the efficiency of filtering and ignoring distractor objects (Exp. 1) and of filtering irrelevant features (Exp. 2). Both younger and older adults could not ignore irrelevant features when cued with a retrocue. Overall, our results provide no evidence for an aging deficit in using attention to manage visual WM.
Highlights
It is widely recognized that healthy older adults show a decline in working memory (WM)compared to younger adults [1,2,3]
Given the performance levels, we observed in the experiments, this computation yielded uninterpretable values. This happened because some scores in the Filtering and Ignoring conditions were even better than in the Low-Load condition
We tested for an age difference in filtering against this baseline assuming that older adults performed worse than younger, but our results showed strong evidence against this difference
Summary
It is widely recognized that healthy older adults show a decline in working memory (WM)compared to younger adults [1,2,3]. One prominent explanation of WM age-related decline states that older adults have difficulties in using attention to efficiently manage the contents of WM. The abilities to filter distractors at encoding (hereafter “filtering”) and to ignore distractors during memory maintenance (hereafter “ignoring”) have been shown to bear different relations to an individual’s WM capacity [7,8]. These abilities can be directed to different objects [9] or different features of an object [10,11]
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