Aging and a benefit of distractibility

Under instructions to ignore distraction, younger and older adults read passages with interspersed distracting words. Some of the distractors served as solutions to a subsequent set of verbal problems in which three weakly related words could be related by retrieving a missing fourth word (i.e., the Remote Associates Test [RAT]; Mednick, 1962). Older adults showed significant priming from the distraction, whereas younger adults did not. In this study, we present a case in which age-related reductions in attentional control over information that was not initially relevant can actually lead to superior performance for older adults. The RAT materials may be downloaded from www.psychononiic.org/archive.