AGING AND MIND WANDERING - REDUCED INHIBITION IN OLDER ADULTS

Hasher and Zacks (1988) theorize that aging disrupts the efficient ope ration of an inhibitory mechanism that, when functioning normally, is thought to suppress information irrelevant to one's cognitive goals. P roblems with this inhibitory mechanism should produce increased mind w andering, and the present experiment examined this possibility using a performance-based measure of mind wandering. Younger and older partic ipants were presented with a long list of words and were occasionally stopped (at unpredictable intervals) and asked to recall the most rece ntly presented items. Mind wandering was inferred by conditionalizing recall on these unpredictable trials with recall on short, predictable trials tilt which, presumably, participants were able to maintain ful l attention to the recall task). Whereas mind wandering was shown to b e higher on longer trials than shorter ones, there was no evidence of age differences in mind wandering.