Older Adults are Impaired by Distractors Presented During Working Memory Encoding

Working memory (WM) performance declines across the lifespan, partly due to greater vulnerability to environmental distraction. WM requires resistance to distractors, which may enter WM due to ineffective filtering during simultaneous presentation with targets, as in a spatial array during WM encoding. Alternatively, distractors may enter WM due to insufficient ability to ignore them when they are presented during WM maintenance. Current research disagrees about whether a deficit in distractor suppression accounts for older adults’ impaired WM performance, or not. Beyond these differing perspectives, it is unclear whether WM performance is vulnerable to different types of distractors, including those that are novel versus familiar, or high versus low saliency. Across three behavioral experiments we found that participants were more vulnerable to distractors presented during encoding than those presented during maintenance, with stronger effects in older adults. Distractor familiarity and saliency had minimal impact on WM performance, and patterns of results did not change across trials. Rather than providing converging evidence these data expand the pattern of distractor-related WM deficits observed in older adults.