Pun Punyawish¹ (), Viola Stoermer², Chaipat Chunharas^1,3; ¹Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, ²Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, ³King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, Thai Red Cross Society, Bangkok, Thailand

Previous research has provided mixed evidence as to how well older adults successfully ignore frequent distractors during visual search (Lega et al., 2023; Yao et al., 2025). In younger adults, studies indicate that the effectiveness of distractor ignoring may depend on the mechanisms engaged, in particular whether participants are explicitly cued to ignore specific features or are incidentally learning about likely distractors (e.g., Addleman & Störmer, 2023). We here tested two questions: (1) whether distractor ignoring is preserved in old age for cued and learned attention, and (2) whether its effectiveness is modulated by the usefulness of the feature regularities in mitigating distraction. Younger (n=46) and older adults (n=43, age>60) performed a block design visual search task looking for a target (left/right gap Landolt C) among other 7 distractors (top/bottom gap). Color probabilities of the items were manipulated such that the distractors occurred more often in one out of four colors used across the experiment. Participants either implicitly learned the color probabilities (learned ignoring; Exp. 1) or explicitly informed about these probabilities (cued ignoring; Exp. 2). We also varied the distractor-to-target ratio on each block, such that there were either 4 or 6 high-probability-color distractors present in the search array.  We found that both age groups were faster in finding the target on trials with the frequent distractor present, indicating that explicit cue and incidental learning of distractor features speeds response times (RT) during search. Interestingly, only older adults showed stronger RT benefits for trials in which more high-probability-color distractors were present in the search display. Overall, our results suggest preserved distractor suppression in aging, with an age-specific sensitivity to the distractor-target ratio. This may suggest that older adults up-weighted the color-probability information to support performance when particularly useful.