How Do Verbal Distractors Influence Age-Related Operation Span Performance? A Manipulation of Inhibitory Control Demands

Abstract

This study examined how different verbal distractors influence (age-related) performance in the operation span working memory task. Forty-six older (M = 68 years, SD = 3.82) and 49 younger adults (M = 27 years, SD = 3.02) performed a conventional operation span task version and three versions with non-related, conceptually related, or phonologically related distracting words. Thus, the amount of inhibitory control demands varied across the task versions. Age effects were found for all versions. Furthermore, age effects in the versions with distracting words were even larger than in the conventional version, indicating that a decline in the ability to inhibit irrelevant verbal information can partly explain age effects in working memory performance.

Notes

Gender did not have an effect on the results. Therefore, we only report analyses on the pooled data of male and female participants.

Additional analyses on difference scores revealed that older adults showed a significantly larger decline from the normal version to each of the distractor versions than younger adults (t tests on difference scores between performance in the standard version and each of the distractor versions: age effect in the non-related version: t(93) = − 3.20, p < .01, Partial η² = .10; age effect in the conceptual version: t(93) = − 2.08, p < .05, Partial η² = .05; age effect in the phonological version: t(93) = − 1.83, p < .10, Partial η² = .04).

Note. Intrusion scores were assessed by the number of distracting words that were named at recall of the items in an operation span version relative to the number of all words named by a person in that version. Obviously, we did not obtain an intrusion score from the standard version, as in this version no distracting words were presented.