Age differences in vulnerability to distraction under arousal.

Aging affects brain circuitry involved in both inhibition and arousal. In this study, we tested whether older adults are more or less prone to distraction from emotionally arousing events than young adults. To do so, we examined how arousing taboo distractor words affected concurrent 1-back task performance and subsequent memory for distractors. Our second goal was to examine how the arousal level of 1 item can modulate processing of preceding neutral distractors (taboo-minus-1 distractors). During the task, participants first made 1-back judgments about target pictures that were superimposed with to-be-ignored neutral or taboo distractors. Relative to young adults, older adults were more distracted by taboo than neutral words on the 1-back task and remembered more of the taboo distractors on a later incidental recognition task. Furthermore, young adults showed better suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors than neutral distractors, whereas in older adults, arousal did not facilitate suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. This effect appeared to require attentional control as adding an unrelated attentional load during the 1-back task eliminated the beneficial effect of arousal for young adults' suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors. Finally, when top-down attentional guidance was provided by increasing the goal relevance of target pictures, both groups showed enhanced suppression of taboo-minus-1 distractors versus other neutral distractors. Together, these findings imply that the effect of arousal on distractibility in aging may arise from an interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes.