Reduced distractor filtering with age: Evidence from the distractor positivity ERP

In our everyday lives, there are many instances during which we must guide our attention towards a goal while ignoring irrelevant information. In these situations, we rely on attentional control to engage cognitive resources necessary to ignore salient irrelevant distractors. Although this process can be facilitated by providing cues (e.g., a positive cue that indicates attend to blue), negative cues (indicating what to ignore) may initially bias attention towards distractors (Zhang et al., 2020). This may be especially the case in individuals with less efficient inhibitory control, such as anxious individuals (Salahub & Emrich, 2021) and older adults (Torres et al., 2023; Weeks et al., 2020) . To test the efficacy of target and distractor processing in a sample with lower inhibitory abilities, older adults’ filtering performance was compared to that of younger adults during a search task while EEG was recorded. Participants were provided with either positive or negative pre-cues to indicate the feature of the target or distractor location, as well as a neutral control condition. The results indicate older adults only benefit from positive cues, as demonstrated by a higher mean amplitude of the N2pc component, as well as shorter reaction times, in response to lateral targets. However, in contrast to young adults, when presented with negative cues, older adults showed no Pd component to lateral distractors in any condition, suggesting that older adults did not inhibit the distracting information. These results suggest that older adults (with impaired inhibitory abilities) have particular difficulty suppressing distractors when a negative cue is provided, presumably because they have difficult disengaging attention from negatively cued items once it is directed there.