McNab et al., 2015, Age-related changes in working memory and the ability to ignore distraction, PNAS
Working memory (WM) abilities/capacity declines with age, but why? One proposal is that increased aging brings about a reduced ability to filter out distractors. Here, the authors use a dataset from a smartphone task (N ~ 30000) that includes conditions of no distractor, encoding distractor, and delay distractor. The goal is to tease apart how aging impacts distractors during encoding or during the delay period.
They find a strong effect of delay-period distraction being impacted by aging, and not encoding distraction. However, further modeling also suggests that an increased ability to filter out distractors at encoding is a compensatory mechanism to combat the clear loss of ability to filter during the delay.
Cool!