Don't pay attention! Paradoxical effects of monetary incentive on attentional performance in older adults

Adult aging is associated with reductions in attentional control, but performance may be influenced by factors including types of attention assessed (e.g. sustaining, resistance distraction) and participants’ motivation. In Experiment 1, we used the Continuous Temporal Expectancy Task with Video Distractor (Berry, Li, Lin, and Lustig), a timing task to assess young and older adults’ ability to sustain attention, and manipulated whether a nearby laptop was silent or playing videos to access distractor vulnerability. Older adults outperformed young adults overall. Self-report measures suggested that lack of engagement by young adults drove this paradoxical age difference. Experiment 2 directly tested the effect of motivation via monetary incentives. The monetary incentive tended to improve the performance of young adults, but significantly reduced the performance of older adults. Incentive had its primary effects on focused attention and overall performance rather than specific effects on either sustained attention or distraction control.