Older adults encode more, not less: evidence for age-related attentional broadening

Previous work has shown that older adults attend to and implicitly remember more distracting information than young adults; however, it is unknown whether they show a corresponding decrease in implicit memory for targets in the presence of distracters. Using implicit memory tests, we asked whether older adults show a tradeoff in memory between targets and distracters. Here, young and older adults performed a selective attention task in which they were instructed to attend to target pictures and ignore superimposed distracter words. We measured priming for distracter words using fragment completion and for target pictures using naming time. Older adults showed greater priming for distracting words compared to young adults, but equivalent priming for target pictures. These results suggest that older adults have a broader attentional scope than young adults, encompassing both relevant and irrelevant information.