Adult Age Differences in Divided Attention: Effects of Elaboration During Memory Encoding

The present study used attention operating characteristics (AOCs) to examine whether age differences existed in divided attention (DA) performance when both primary (cued recall) and secondary tasks (letter recall) were analyzed simultaneously. Additionally, to determine if age differences in DA might depend on the amount of elaborative processing required at study, participants either read (low elaboration) or generated (high elaboration) target words. AOC analyses indicated that performance was disrupted most when attention was divided at encoding versus retrieval, and dividing attention had a greater negative impact on older adults’ performance relative to younger adults’. Furthermore, the high elaboration condition was less affected by DA than the low elaboration condition for both age groups. The results indicate that although the ability to divide attention declines with age, some elaborative study strategies may be more resistant to DA effects for both younger and older adults.