Age differences in cross-task bleeding

The present study investigated age-related differences in the ability to constrain attention to the current task, without contamination (bleeding) from an upcoming decision. Each experiment included two blocks of trials. During Block 1, participants initially incidentally encoded a list of high- and low-frequency words, after which they pronounced aloud the studied words intermixed with a new set of words during a test phase. Block 2 was identical to Block 1 with the exception that after pronouncing each word aloud, participants made an additional decision (episodic recognition decision in Experiments 1 and 2 and animacy decision in Experiment 3). In the first two experiments, older adults showed disproportionate slowing in their response times to pronounce the words when they additionally had to make a recognition judgment afterward (Block 2) compared to when they only pronounced the words aloud (Block 1). Importantly, the difference between high-frequency and low-frequency words (the word frequency effect) was disproportionately attenuated for older adults in Block 2 compared to Block 1 and compared to younger adults. These results suggest that older adults experience greater cross-task bleeding than younger adults because word frequency has opposing effects in pronunciation and recognition tasks. As predicted, this age modulation of the word frequency effect in pronunciation performance was not replicated in Experiment 3 when participants made an animacy judgment, wherein word frequency effects act in concert with those of the pronunciation task. Discussion focuses on age-related differences in the ability to constrain attention to a current task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).