Inhibition and aging: Similarities between younger and older adults as revealed by the processing of unattended auditory information

The ability to selectively attend to an auditory stimulus appears to declin e with age and may result from losses in the ability to inhibit the process ing of irrelevant stimuli (i.e., the inhibitory deficit hypothesis; L. Hash er &: R. T. Zacks, 1988). It is also possible that declines in the ability to selectively attend are a result of age-related hearing losses. Three exp eriments examined whether older and younger adults differed in their abilit y to inhibit the processing of distracting stimuli when the listening situa tion was adjusted to correct for individual differences in hearing. In all 3 experiments, younger and older adults were equally affected by irrelevant stimuli, unattended stimuli, or both. The implications for auditory attent ion research and for possible differences between auditory and visual proce ssing are discussed.