Citation

McNab F, Zeidman P, Rutledge RB, Smittenaar P, Brown HR, Adams RA, Dolan RJ. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2015; 112(20): 6515-6518.

Affiliation

Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom; and.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1504162112

PMID

25941369

Abstract

A weakened ability to effectively resist distraction is a potential basis for reduced working memory capacity (WMC) associated with healthy aging. Exploiting data from 29,631 users of a smartphone game, we show that, as age increases, working memory (WM) performance is compromised more by distractors presented during WM maintenance than distractors presented during encoding. However, with increasing age, the ability to exclude distraction at encoding is a better predictor of WMC in the absence of distraction. A significantly greater contribution of distractor filtering at encoding represents a potential compensation for reduced WMC in older age.

Language: en