Reflections of the Past: Investigating the Mechanism of Distraction Transfer in Older Adulthood

Previous work has demonstrated that human aging is associated with an increase in attention to visual distraction and that older adultsâ implicit knowledge of previous distracters can affect their performance on later tasks. This thesis investigated the mechanism of distraction transfer by examining the effect of reduced attentional control on distracter processing during encoding (Studies 1-3), retention (Study 4), and retrieval (Study 5). Studies 1 and 2 investigated whether people attend to distraction at the cost of attending to targets; Study 1 showed that implicit memory for distracters is not accompanied by decreased implicit memory for targets, and Study 2 showed that distraction transfer is not eliminated in older adults when target stimuli are more attentionally captivating. Study 3 demonstrated that young adults show distraction transfer when their capacity for attentional control is diminished under divided attention conditions. Study 4 provided evidence that distracters remain active in working memory after encoding using functional magnetic neuroimaging (fMRI) and multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA). Lastly, Study 5 showed that older adults automatically reactivate previous distracters during a test task.Ph.D