New research published this week in Psychological Science has shown that while older brains have more difficulty filtering out extraneous information than younger brains, they appear to make great use of this information.

Karen Campbell, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Toronto, working with the Rotman Institute, says “We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks.

Dr. Lynn Hasher, whose work at the Rotman Institute focuses on inhibitory control over the contents of working memory, explains the advantage of this process: 

“This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction. Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults. As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they have picked up so much more information.”

Read the full article here.