Older adults find it harder to ignore certain types of distraction

What is it about?

Humans are easier to distract when we are already performing a challenging task, but research has not previously explored whether the type of distraction that we find most challenging changes as we get older. This study shows that older adults find multisensory distraction (the sound of someone speaking while they complete a visual task on a computer) especially difficult to ignore.

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Photo by Joseph Sintum on Unsplash

Photo by Joseph Sintum on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Multisensory perception is the brain's ability to use information from our multiple senses (vision, hearing, touch, etc.) to help us better understand the world. There are lots of studies showing that older adults do this differently to younger people. However, not much research has tested whether these age differences are specific to multisensory perception, so it could be that the findings are all caused by more general effects of ageing. This study directly compared a multisensory distraction task (vision and hearing) with an equivalent vision-only task, and only found age differences in the multisensory version. This shows that ageing does lead to changes that are specific to multisensory perception.

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