Alex Holcombe¹, Viplav Tuladhar¹, Loretta Duffy¹, Styliani Katsoulis¹, Joshua Pham¹, Vince Tafea¹, Rachel Wong¹, Sarah Cronje¹, Yuenchen Lee¹; ¹The University of Sydney

Based on possibly the largest published study of visual attention in older adults, Verissimo et al. (2022) concluded that attentional orienting and executive inhibitory efficiency improved with age until people are in their mid-to-late 70s. Re-analysing their data, we reveal that the orienting improvement finding is based on a coding error. We also question the validity of their inhibitory efficiency and orienting measures. To address the orienting or attentional shifting issue ourselves with a new empirical study, we conducted a multiple object tracking study based on that of Roudaia & Faubert (2017). In that paradigm, with objects widely spaced to avoid spatial interference, speed thresholds are limited by temporal interference between distractors and targets (Holcombe & Chen, 2013; Roudaia & Faubert, 2017). After implementing changes to avoid spatial interference and ensure the older adults understood the task, we replicated the finding of Roudaia & Faubert (2017) that older adults' multiple object tracking temporal thresholds are substantially worse than that of undergraduates, despite them performing similarly on a matrix reasoning task. These findings further undermine the conclusions of Verissimo et al. (2022) and suggest that older adults have particular difficulty with avoiding long-lasting activation of distracting stimuli.