Cognitive aging: is t

side to environment an, U Opinionsiderable amount of ‘attentional resources’, which decline with advancing adult age. From the current perspective, deploying attentional resources refers to maintaining task representations through recurrent connections between prefrontal and more posterior regions of the brain [2]. The ability to hold task representations in mind declines with age [3], as reflected by impairments in a variety of cognitive functions such as attention, working memory tion to attended stimuli were positively correlated with independently assessed measures of perceptual speed (Figure 1A). In older adults, however, individual differ-ences in synchronization were negatively correlated with perceptual speed (Figure 1B). These results indicate that the early representation of auditory sensory events in old age occurs in a highly stimulus-driven manner that is less easily modulated by top-down influences and less easily integrated into ongoing cognitive activity. Likewise, Passow et al. examined adult age differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and atten-tional control over auditory processing [7] in a dichotic listening task originally introduced by Hugdahl et al. [8] and later refined by Westerhausen et al. [9]. Perceptual saliency was manipulated by decreasing the intensity of either the right- or the left-ear input in 5-dB steps until a maximum difference of 20 dB between ears was reached. 1364-6613/ $ – see front matte