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Running Head: EFFECT OF AGE ON ATTENTION

Effect of Age on Attention:

Are Young Adults Better at Ignoring Distractions?
Rachel Schoen
1001567716
University of Toronto
PSY201

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EFFECT OF AGE ON ATTENTION

Effect of Age on Attention:

Are Young Adults Better at Ignoring Distractions?
In Hasher and Zacks' 1988 study, age differences in the ability to place attention towards
a task in which irrelevant information must be ignored was examined. This capacity was tested
using a word-fragment completion puzzle, where memory was measured implicitly. These
implicit measures were defined as a lack of awareness in recollecting. Conversely, explicit
memory would require a cognizant recollection of past experiences. In the study, participants
were oblivious to the fact that the target words had been unveiled previously and were unaware
that these words were the same words needed to complete the word-fragment completion task
(from Rowe et al., 2014). Based on previous research (Lustig, Hasher, & Tonev, in press) (Mack
& Rock, 1998), I predict young adults will solve more word fragments than older adults due to
their superior ability to separate distractions from the task at hand.
Methods
Participants
Thirty-four young adults between 18 and 30 years of age, and thirty-four older adults
ranging between 60 and 75 years of age, participated in this study. The young adults were
university students who received course credit for their aid. Older adults were communitydwelling volunteers and had received payment for their contribution. (from Rowe et al., 2014).
Material
Simple line drawings were chosen from a picture set refined by Snodgrass and
Vanderwart (1980). These illustrations were covered with equal numbers of either random letterstrings or complete words.

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Procedure
The experiment comprised of a study phase and a test phase. During the study phase,
participants watched a sequence of individual images (presented for 1500ms at a time), some of
which were overlapped with either random letters, a filler word, or a target word. Participants
were told to ignore the words in order to determine if there was any difference or similarities
between the pictures by pressing the spacebar whenever two consecutive images were identical.
Thus, even though the task was relatively simple, it required the subject to pay attention to the
drawing in order to be completed successfully. After roughly 10 minutes (during which,
participants underwent an unrelated visual memory assignment), the test phase began. The
subjects' memory for the words intended to be ignored was tested with a word-fragment
completion task, in which participants viewed fragments of words (e.g., L_T_E_Y) and
responded aloud with the first word that came to mind (e.g., LOTTERY). Of the 30 wordfragments used in the test phase, 10 were fragments of target words shown in the study phase, 10
were fragmented control words that were not presented, and 10 were easy-to-solve fragments
that served as fillers to ensure participants felt successful during the task, and to conceal the link
between the study phase and test phase. Target and control words were given equally between
participants (Procedure from Rowe et al., 2014).
Data Analysis
I chose to conduct an independent measures t-test based off the data given: in particular,
that there were two distinct groups (older adults aged 60 - 75 vs. younger adults aged 18 - 30)
that needed to be tested for mean differences between, and additionally because the parent
population data was unknown. The data being randomly sampled from a normally distributed
was assumed for this assignment, as was the homogeneity of variance, for the sample size n was

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34. To be sure, I conducted an f-max test and found the homogeneity of variance assumption to
be correct; F max = 1.1476 while the critical-t value for df=33 was 2.07 when = 0.05 and k =2.
This implies there is no significant different between the variances, and it is safe to conduct the ttest as no assumptions are being violated.
Results
An independent measures t-test was run, and as demonstrated in Figure 1, a significant
difference was found between older (M = 56.86, SD = 60.95) and younger (M = 36.52, SD =
17.92) adults in the ability to ignore distractions while maintaining attention on a given task,
with older adults remembering and giving more correct answers than younger ones, t(64) = 3.47,
p < 0.05, d = 0.843. According to Cohen's guidelines, this is a large effect size, suggesting that
age can greatly affect the ability to ignore irrelevant information.
Discussion
In this study, we compared adults' susceptibility to distraction and their ability to ignore
extraneous detail. This was done using word completion puzzle tests after a brief phase of study.
Based off the data complied, there is a significant difference between older and younger adults:
younger adults recognized and provided less correct answers than older adults, suggesting that
the hypothesis proposed was incorrect. This finding contradicts previous studies' work on young
adults' inattentional blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998), and older adults' trouble differentiating
between relevant and irrelevant information (Lustig, Hasher, & Tonev, in press). According to
these studies, young adults should be superior at ignoring trivial information, failing to respond
or to remember material presented in plain sight (Mack & Rock, 1998), while older adults
struggle with processing both strands of information all at once (Lustig et al., in press).
There are a multitude of reasons as to why this contradiction might be. It is possible that

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older adults had ignored the instructions to focus solely on the images, and remembered both the
words and images, just as it is possible the younger adults had simply remembered less. The
younger adults, aged 18 - 30, may also have been experiencing fatigue from the daily stresses of
school and work. There is a lot left unknown about the participants of the study, such as whether
English was their first language, or if perhaps the older adults were more avid fans of word
puzzles, and therefore more easily able to identify certain words. With more information, we
could begin to ascertain this difference between age groups through elimination of these
unknown variables.

References
Angeli, E., Wagner, J., Lawrick, E., Moore, K., Anderson, M., Soderlund, L., & Brizee, A.
(2010, May 5). General format. Retrieved from
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01

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Hasher, L. & Zacks, R.T. (1988). Working memory, comprehension, and aging: A review and a
new view. Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 22, 193-225.
Lustig, C., Hasher, L., & Tonev, S. T. (in press). Distraction as a determinant of processing
speed. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Mack, A. & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Snodgrass, J.G. & Vanderwart, M. (1980). Norms for picture stimuli. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 205-210.

Appendix
Figure 1: Mean percent of correct answers for the two age groups studied: older adults, (a), and
younger adults, (b).

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EFFECT OF AGE ON ATTENTION

Figure 1. Average Percentage of Correct Answers vs. Age Group

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60.00
56.86
50.00

Percentage of Correct Answers

40.00
36.52
30.00

20.00

10.00

0.00
Older Adults (A)

Age Group

Younger Adults (B)