Studying Effect of Age on Ability to Ignore Distractions
Introduction
With aging, people tend to perform poorly on cognitive tasks as they are unable to ignore non-relevant information. At the same time, young adults are observed to be adept at ignoring irrelevant information as they seem to be more focussed and have the ability to ignore distractions. Research studies published so far are throwing highly contrasting results. Mack & Rock (1998) in studies related to inattentional blindness (IB) formulated a working hypothesis that there is no perception without attention, as young adults failed to respond or to remember information presented in the centre of their visual field.
This ...