Centre for Policy on Ageing



Inhibition and aging — similarities between younger and older adults as revealed by the processing of unattended auditory information
Author(s)	Dana R Murphy, Joan M McDowd, Kim A Wilcox
Journal title	Psychology and Aging, vol 14, no 1, March 1999
Pages	pp 44-59
Keywords	Listening ; Hearing Impairment ; Cognitive processes ; Young people ; Age groups [elderly] ; Measurement ; United States of America.
Annotation	The ability to selectively attend to an auditory stimulus appears to decline with age, and may result from losses in the ability to inhibit the process of irrelevant stimuli (i.e. the inhibitory deficit hypothesis of L Hasher and R T Zacks, 1988). It is also possible that declines in the ability to selectively attend are a result of age-related hearing losses. Three experiments examined whether younger or older adults differed in their ability to inhibit the processing of distracting stimuli when the listening situation was adjusted to correct for individual differences in hearing. In all three experiments, younger and older adults were equally affected by irrelevant stimuli, unattended stimuli, or both. The implications for auditory attention research and for possible differences between auditory and visual processing are discussed. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-990825203 A
Classmark	UOA: BV: DA: SB: BB: 3R: 7T
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing

...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.