Covert Reminders: The Use of Distraction to Enhance Memory in Older Adults

Aging is associated with difficulty down-regulating attention to distraction and increased forgetting in explicit memory tests. This thesis explored whether older adults' distractibility can counterintuitively boost memory when presentations of distraction provide an opportunity for memory-strengthening rehearsal between learning and a delayed memory test. Four studies used the same general procedure: Younger and older participants studied and recalled a list of words on an initial test and again on a surprise test following a 15-min delay. During the delay, participants completed a 1-back task in which half of the studied words appeared as distractors. The first two studies examined whether repeating studied words as distraction midway through (Study 1a) or at the end of a delay interval (Study 2) would reduce forgetting for older, but not younger adults, who previous research has shown can effectively ignore distraction. Studies 3a and 3b explored whether younger and older adults can retroactively take advantage of rehearsal opportunities presented as distraction when directly instructed about their relevance at retrieval. Finally, Study 4 explored whether positive and neutral moods, which are known to affect attentional control abilities, influence the costs and benefits of distraction as a rehearsal device in younger adults. Results indicated that repeating to-be-remembered words as distraction minimized (Study 1a) or eliminated (Studies 2, 3b) older adults' forgetting, consistently resulting in final recall that was equivalent to younger adults' recall. Repeating words as distraction did modulate younger adults' recall by increasing forgetting of unrepeated words when they were directly cued about the repetitions (Study 3a), and by increasing forgetting of repeated words under induced neutral moods (Study 4). Nonetheless, younger adults showed clear forgetting of repeated words across all experiments. These results demonstrate that distraction can serve as covert reminders for older adults, a finding with implications for the reduction of prevalent age differences in explicit memory performance.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0