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The hypothesis that older adults experience a decline in the efficiency of inhibitory processes was tested in a negative priming experiment. Negative priming is interpreted as being due to the previous inhibition of a subsequent target item. An experiment involving a visual selective attention task with a negative priming condition was conducted with 20 college students and 20 older adults. A letter-reading task with partially superimposed red and green letters was used to assess age differences in negative priming. Subjects read red letters and ignored green letters. Results showed a significant interaction between age and the effect of distracting information, with older adults being more slowed by the presence of green letters than young adults. However, older adults failed to show negative priming effects, whereas young adults did show negative priming. These findings are interpreted in the context of age deficits in inhibitory processes, which may lead to decreased performance on selective attention tasks.
McDowd et al. (Fri,) studied this question.