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Updated: Jul 13, 2026

A Cognitive Paradigm to Investigate Interference in Working Memory by Distractions and Interruptions
Published on: July 16, 2015
Aging and a benefit of distractibility
Sunghan Kim1, Lynn Rasher, Rose T Zacks
1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. shkim@psych.utoronto.ca
Abstract:
Under instructions to ignore distraction, younger and older adults read passages with interspersed distracting words. Some of the distractors served as solutions to a subsequent set of verbal problems in which three weakly related words could be related by retrieving a missing fourth word (i.e., the Remote Associates Test [RAT]; Mednick, 1962). Older adults showed significant priming from the distraction, whereas younger adults did not. In this study, we present a case in which age-related reductions in attentional control over information that was not initially relevant can actually lead to superior performance for older adults. The RAT materials may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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