Aging and Distraction by Irrelevant Speech: Does Emotional Valence Matter?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: From prior studies, we know that older adults are rarely more distracted by irrelevant speech than younger adults, which is remarkable in light of the inhibitory deficit view of aging. We tested the hypothesis that older adults are more distracted by emotional irrelevant speech during a visual cognitive task than younger adults. METHODS: Forty-eight younger (mean age = 21.9 years) and 48 older individuals (mean age = 68.1 years) performed a visual counting task while being exposed to irrelevant speech consisting of random numbers intermixed with neutral, positive, or negative words. Performance in these conditions was compared with that in a silence condition. RESULTS: Irrelevant speech increased counting time and decreased accuracy similarly for younger and older adults. Furthermore, the emotional conditions did not elicit a stronger effect than the neutral condition. Finally, we found implicit memory for irrelevant speech, but its level was independent of emotional valence and age. DISCUSSION: We conclude that emotional irrelevant speech has no disproportionate impact on cognitive performance in older adults. This can be regarded as a challenge to the inhibitory deficit hypothesis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".