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Dynamic Adjustments Of Cognitive Control In Healthy Aging: A Diffusion Model Analysis, Andrew Jacob Aschenbrenner

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The control of attention over salient yet irrelevant information is a critical component of goal-directed behavior. Compared to younger adults, older adults often produce larger interference effects in tasks which tap selective attention, a deficit that has typically been viewed as reflecting an age-related decline in attentional control processes. Interference in distinct, attentionally demanding tasks has produced different influences on the characteristics of underlying response time distributions leading to the assumption of different control mechanisms operating across various paradigms. More recently, accumulating research has shown that the magnitude of observed interference can be critically modulated by the congruency of the …