Age dependent changes of distractibility and reorienting of attention revisited: an event-related potential study.

Adults of three age groups (18-27, 39-45, and 59-66 years) performed an auditory duration discrimination task with short (200 ms) or long (400 ms) sinusoidal tones. Performance was highly accurate and reaction times were on the same level in all groups, indicating no differences in auditory duration processing. Task irrelevant rare changes of the frequency of the stimuli were introduced to check whether the subjects, firstly, were distracted by changes in the environment while focusing on the task relevant information (indicated by prolonged responses), and, secondly, could re-focus on the relevant task after distraction. The results show that a distraction effect is present in all groups. …