London : Older people tend to be more easily distracted than younger adults, a study has found, suggesting that young people respond in a similar way to events but as they age, their thought patterns diverge, reports IANS.
As we age, our ability to control the focus of attention tends to decline and we end up attending to more “distracting” information than younger adults.
“As a result, older adults end up attending to a more diverse range of stimuli and so are more likely to understand and interpret everyday events in different ways than younger people,” said Dr Karen Campbell from the department of psychology from University of Cambridge.
To try to understand how we respond to complex, life-like stimuli, researchers showed 218 participants, aged 18-88, an edited version of an episode from the Alfred Hitchcock TV series while using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity. The study appeared in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
