Older adults don't notice their names: A new twist to a classic attention task
Moshe Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues report five experiments showing one way in which older adults, who have lower working memory spans on average, resemble higher-capacity young adults. In a selective-listening task, older adults almost always failed to notice their names when they were presented in an unattended channel. This exaggerated what high-span young adults show and was the opposite of the pattern in low-span young adults. The result held after controlling for working memory span and for noticing names in an attended channel, and it replicated with slower presentation and with the unattended ear controlled. The authors propose an inhibition factor, which lets high-span young adults suppress the channel to be ignored, and an attentional capacity factor, with more unallocated capacity allowing low-span young adults to notice their names much more often than older adults with comparably low spans.
Moshe Naveh-Benjamin and colleagues report five experiments showing one way in which older adults, who have lower working memory spans on average, resemble higher-capacity young adults. In a selective-listening task, older adults almost always failed to notice their names when they were presented in an unattended channel. This exaggerated what high-span young adults show and was the opposite of the pattern in low-span young adults. The result held after controlling for working memory span and for noticing names in an attended channel, and it replicated with slower presentation and with the unattended ear controlled. The authors propose an inhibition factor, which lets high-span young adults suppress the channel to be ignored, and an attentional capacity factor, with more unallocated capacity allowing low-span young adults to notice their names much more often than older adults with comparably low spans.
Written from the abstract read 2026-10-22 in the PubMed Central author manuscript.
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Naveh-Benjamin, M., Kilb, A., Maddox, G., Thomas, J., Fine, H., Chen, T., & Cowan, N. (2014). Older adults don’t notice their names: a new twist to a classic attention task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(6), 1540-1550. doi:10.1037/xlm0000020