Are older adults susceptible to visual distraction when targets and distractors are spatially separated?

ABSTRACT

Older adults show preserved memory for previously distracting information due to reduced inhibitory control. In some previous studies, targets and distractors overlap both temporally and spatially. We investigated whether age differences in attentional orienting and disengagement affect recognition memory when targets and distractors are spatially separated at encoding. In Experiments 1 and 2, eye movements were recorded while participants completed an incidental encoding task under covert (i.e., restricted viewing) and overt (i.e., free-viewing) conditions, respectively. The encoding task consisted of pairs of target and distractor item-color stimuli presented in separate visual hemifields. Prior to stimulus onset, a central cue indicated the location of the upcoming target. Participants were subsequently tested on their recognition of the items, their location, and the associated color. In Experiment 3, targets were validly cued on 75% of the encoding trials; on invalid trials, participants had to disengage their attention from the distractor and reorient to the target. Associative memory for colors was reduced among older adults across all experiments, though their location memory was only reduced in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, older and younger adults directed a similar proportion of fixations toward targets and distractors. Explicit recognition of distractors did not differ between age groups in any of the experiments. However, older adults were slower to correctly recognize distractors than false alarm to novel items in Experiment 2, suggesting some implicit memory for distraction. Together, these results demonstrate that older adults may only be vulnerable to encoding visual distraction when viewing behavior is unconstrained.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• inhibitory control
• recognition memory
• distraction
• eye-tracking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rsy7f/ (Experiments 1 and 2) and https://osf.io/f7jhx/ (Experiment 3).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2022.2117271

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under Grant number RGPIN-2017-06178, the Alzheimer Society of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research 143311,PJT-162292 (CIHR) under Grant number PJT-162292 to RO; and the CIHR Foundation Grant number 143311 to CG.