Are older adults susceptible to visual distraction when targets and distractors are spatially separated?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Older adults show preserved memory for previously distracting information due to reduced inhibitory control. In some previous studies, targets and distractors overlap both temporally and spatially. We investigated whether age differences in attentional orienting and disengagement affect recognition memory when targets and distractors are spatially separated at encoding. In Experiments 1 and 2, eye movements were recorded while participants completed an incidental encoding task under covert (i.e., restricted viewing) and overt (i.e., free-viewing) conditions, respectively. The encoding task consisted of pairs of target and distractor item-color stimuli presented in separate visual hemifields. Prior to stimulus onset, a central cue indicated the location of the upcoming target. Participants were subsequently tested on their recognition of the items, their location, and the associated color. In Experiment 3, targets were validly cued on 75% of the encoding trials; on invalid trials, participants had to disengage their attention from the distractor and reorient to the target. Associative memory for colors was reduced among older adults across all experiments, though their location memory was only reduced in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, older and younger adults directed a similar proportion of fixations toward targets and distractors. Explicit recognition of distractors did not differ between age groups in any of the experiments. However, older adults were slower to correctly recognize distractors than false alarm to novel items in Experiment 2, suggesting some implicit memory for distraction. Together, these results demonstrate that older adults may only be vulnerable to encoding visual distraction when viewing behavior is unconstrained.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".