Gaze aversion: spared inhibition for visual distraction in older adults

Our everyday environment is filled with irrelevant and potentially distracting information. Recent research has shown that during retrieval people tend to look away from distraction or close their eyes and that averting one's gaze benefits retrieval. We examined the extent to which there are age-related differences in the benefits of gaze aversion and whether the benefits of gaze aversion extend to encoding. Relative to looking at complex stimuli, closing the eyes and looking at simple stimuli produced reliable improvements in memory for both younger and older adults at both encoding and retrieval. Contrary to the expectation that older adults have general inhibitory deficits, the benefits of gaze aversion were similar for younger and older adults at both encoding and retrieval. These results are consistent with the view that older adults have spared inhibitory functioning for distraction appearing in fixed locations.