Aging and mind wandering: reduced inhibition in older adults?

Hasher and Zacks (1988) theorize that aging disrupts the efficient operation of an inhibitory mechanism that, when functioning normally, is thought to suppress information irrelevant to one's cognitive goals. Problems with this inhibitory mechanism should produce increased mind wandering, and the present experiment examined this possibility using a performance-based measure of mind wandering. Younger and older participants were presented with a long list of words and were occasionally stopped (at unpredictable intervals) and asked to recall the most recently presented items. Mind wandering was inferred by conditionalizing recall on these unpredictable trials with recall on short, predictable trials (in which, presumably, participants were able to maintain full attention to the recall task). Whereas mind wandering was shown to be higher on longer trials than shorter ones, there was no evidence of age differences in mind wandering.