Age differences in the effects of facilitating and distracting context on recall

The effect of different types of context on cued recall of nouns embedded in sentences was examined. Younger and older adults studied target nouns embedded in sentences of three types: sentences containing supporting context, sentences with neutral context, and sentences containing context that was distracting to memory of the nouns. In Experiments 1 and 2, supportive sentences facilitated the performance of older adults at least as much as younger adults, and sentences that were distracting disrupted the performance of older but not of younger adults. In Experiment 3, however, when the disruptive nature of the distracting sentences was increased by ensuring that subjects processed the distracting information, there was no age by sentence type interaction. the results suggest that younger adults are better able to ignore distracting information if not required to attend to it, but are almost as disrupted as older adults when forced to attend to distracting information.