Aging Memory: Irrelevant Information Excluded

Our everyday environment is filled with irrelevant and potentially distracting information. Although control by the environment is adaptive in most cases, assuming that processing of the environment demaresources, being clamped to the environment can interfere with the processing of information that is unrelated to stimuli present in the immediate environment. Glenberg, Schroeder and Robertson have shown that people tend to avert their gazes when retrieving moderately difficult information. Einstein ef al. suggest that older adults shnds particularly benefit from gaze aversion and that inhibition has differences in different age. Two experiments were designed to further investigate whether older adults can benefit more from gaze aversion. Experiment 1 explored this problem in different modalities, that is visuospatial modality is occupied by visual distraction and auditorial modality is occupied by items. Experiment 2 explored in the same auditorial modality. The resultsould showed that (1) When the distraction and the items were input in different modalities, the processing resources were shared by both phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad, so there was no special benefits in older adults than in younger adults. (2) When the distraction and the items were input in the same modalities, the processing resources were only given by the phonological loop, the older adults showed benefits from gaze aversion. So we can say that older adults really have difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information.