Age-related differences in distraction and reorientation in an auditory task

Behavioral and event-related potential measures of distraction and reorientation were obtained from children (6 years), young (19–24 years) and elderly adults (62–82 years) in an auditory distraction-paradigm. Participants performed a go/nogo duration discrimination task on a sequence of short and long (50–50%) tones. In children, reaction times were longer and discrimination (d′) scores were lower than in adults. Occasionally (15%), the pitch of the presented tones was changed. The task-irrelevant feature variation resulted in longer reaction times and lower d′ scores with no significant differences between the three groups. Task-irrelevant changes affected the N1 amplitude and elicited the mismatch negativity, N2b, P3 and reorienting negativity (RON) sequence of event-related brain potentials. In children, the P3 latency was the same as in young adults. However the RON component was delayed by about 100 ms. In the elderly, P3 and RON were uniformly delayed by about 80 ms compared to young adults. This pattern of results provides evidence that distraction influences different processing stages in the three groups. Restoration of the task-optimal attention set was delayed in children, whereas in the elderly, the triggering of involuntary attention-switching required longer time.