![]() ![]() ![]() Such failures of attentional regulation likely contribute to an array of age-related cognitive impairments. Specifically, OA show impairments in both focusing and distributing attention in space 24, time 25, and toward important object features 26, 27, 28, 29. Studies of cognitive aging have shown that healthy older adults (OA) are particularly susceptible to interference, likely contributing to deficits in cognitive control and attention regulation 22, 23. Further, resistance to the negative impact of distraction on working memory involves maintaining functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and visual cortical regions 19, 20, 21. Further, we have shown that early engagement of top-down control mechanisms can impact stimulus processing and minimize distraction costs associated with external interference 17, 18. Externally-presented visual and auditory distractions have been shown to impair performance on numerous externally-oriented tasks 9, including episodic memory retrieval 10, 11, 12, categorization performance 13, and attention 14, 15, and also on internally-oriented tasks such as working memory 16, 17. The vast majority of studies have focused on the impact of external interference on performance of a primary task, likely due to the convenience of being able to manipulate external factors in a laboratory environment. Just as goal-directed activities can be derailed by interference from irrelevant stimuli in the external environment, interference can also arise from the internal milieu in the form of intrusive thoughts, emotions, and urges 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or as a complex interaction between these two sources. An obstacle to achieving high-level performance on attention-demanding tasks is interference by both external and internal distraction. Behaviors that are “externally-oriented” are those that depend on the presence of external stimuli (e.g., paying attention to external visual or auditory stimuli, reading, or memory encoding) behaviors that are internally-oriented are those that occur in the absence of any external stimuli (e.g., planning, memory retrieval, calculation, interoception/awareness of internal states and mental imagery). Allocation of attentional resources is essential for such goal-directed behaviors, and attention can be divided into external and internal subsystems 2, 3. Our ability to manage the barrage of sensory inputs that we encounter in the world is what allows us to make appropriate decisions and engage in complex, goal-directed behavior 1. Further, internal distractibility is affected by the presence of external sound and increased suppression of internal distraction. These results suggest that the impact of external distractions differentially impacts performance on tasks with internal, as opposed to external, attentional orientations. On the internally-oriented task, auditory sound only affected performance in older adults. We found that the addition of auditory sound induced a significant decrease in task performance in both younger and older adults on the visual discrimination task, and this was accompanied by a shift in the type of distractions reported (from internal to external). Healthy younger and older adults performed both an externally-oriented visual detection task and an internally-oriented mental rotation task, performed with and without auditory sound delivered through headphones. We investigated how externally- and internally-directed attention was impacted by external distraction, how this modulated internal distraction, and whether these interactions were affected by healthy aging. ![]() However, few studies have explored the nature and underlying mechanisms of the interaction between different attentional orientations and different sources of interference. Attention can be oriented externally to the environment or internally to the mind, and can be derailed by interference from irrelevant information originating from either external or internal sources. ![]()
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