Age Differences in Working Memory Filtering of Distracting Information

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that as people age, cognitive processes such as visual working memory (VWM) performance decline. One potential explanation for this age-related decline in VWM is that older adults have decreased inhibitory control relative to younger adults. This impairs older adults’ ability to ignore irrelevant information, which contributes to VWM filtering ability deficits. While most research investigating filtering ability deficits in older adults has tended to use positive cues, it is unclear whether older adults can also effectively use negative cues to ignore irrelevant information. The current study tested whether older adults can filter out irrelevant information from their VWM using negative cues. Across two experiments, young and older adults were presented with 2 (Experiment 1) or 4 (Experiment 2) display items. Participants were given three different cue types: neutral, negative, or positive. After a delay, participants reported the target’s orientation in a continuous-response task. Our results demonstrate that both age groups’ VWM performance benefitted from being provided a cue (positive or negative) as opposed to no cue (i.e., the neutral condition). However, for both age groups, negative cues were less effective at improving VWM filtering (i.e., more non-target errors) compared to positive cues. Thus, although negative cues aid in filtering of VWM contents, they are less efficient than positive cues. Additionally, older adults are similarly efficient to young adults at inhibiting negatively cued information, resulting in a reduction of distractor intrusions into VWM when using the negative cue, although this benefit is reduced (for both age groups) at higher set sizes.