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There are few situations in which memory performance is bet-ter in older than in younger adults. Recently, however, some studies have found that older adults have better implicit mem-ory than younger adults for material that was irrelevant, or dis-tracting, during initial acquisition. One interpretation of these findings is that older adults are less able to inhibit irrelevant information than younger adults are (Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Hasher, Zacks, & May, 1999), so that older adults process more of such information (e.g., Kim, Hasher, & Zacks, 2007; Rowe, Valderrama, Hasher, & Lenartowicz, 2006). Other research, however, has paradoxically shown that young adults do access irrelevant information when it becomes goal rele-vant on tests of explicit memory (e.g., Dywan & Murphy