Age-related changes in attentional selection: quality of task set or degradation of task set across time?

The present study explores the nature of attentional selection in younger and older adults. Following R. De Jong, E. Berendsen, and R. Cools (1999, Acta Psychologica, Vol. 101, pp. 379-394), we manipulated the response to stimulus interval (RSI) in two attentional selection paradigms to examine if there are age-related differences in the quality of task set and/or the maintenance of task set across time. In Experiment 1, we found that the interference effect in a spatial interference task was (a) overall larger in older adults compared with younger adults, and (b) smaller at the short RSI (200 ms) compared with the long RSI (2000 ms), and (c) not associated with an interaction between age and RSI. The second experiment explored the same variables in a Stroop color interference paradigm. Again, older adults produced a disproportionately larger interference effect than younger adults, the interference effect was smaller at the short RSI compared with the long RSI, and there was no evidence of an interaction between age and RSI. In both experiments, the larger interference effect could not be attributed to age-related general slowing and there was evidence from Vincentile analyses of increasing interference and age effects at the slower response latencies. These results indicate that attentional selection deficits in these two experiments were due to a breakdown in the quality of the task set as opposed to age-related differences in the maintenance of the task set across time.