Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age: Scientific American

Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age: Scientific American: "Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues asked two groups—one made up of 19- to 33-year-olds and the other of 60- to 72-year-olds—to perform a memory task. The researchers used electroencephalography to record electrical signals from the participants’ brains in milliseconds during the task. In contrast to the younger adults, the older group could not suppress distracting stimuli during the first 200 milliseconds after exposure. “At later time points, the ability to ignore does show up,” Gazzaley says. “It’s not abolished, just delayed.” By then, however, the irrelevant information had interfered with the memory task, making the older group less accurate overall than the younger group."