Decision Editor: Robert West, PhD ACCORDING to a recent hypothesis, age-related dif-ferences in selective attention are modality depen-

that age-related deficits are most likely to arise in tasks that require suppressing unimodal rather than cross-modal distraction and in tasks that require suppressing visual dis-traction, regardless of the relevant modality (Figure 1). Evidence for a critical role of sensory modality in age-related distractibility comes from a comparative review of experimental paradigms by sensory modality of relevant and irrelevant information (Guerreiro et al., 2010). Within unimodal selective attention, older adults have long been shown to be more vulnerable to distraction than younger adults in several tasks, including visual and auditory variants of the Stroop task (e.g., Wurm, Labouvie-Vief, Aycock, Rebucal, & Koch, 2004), visual and auditory versions of the Simon tasks (e.g., Pick & Proctor, 1999), and in both reading-with-distraction (e.g., Connelly, Hasher, & Zacks, 1991) and listening-in-noise paradigms (e.g., Tun, O’Kane, &amp