Age differences in the neural response to emotional distraction during working memory encoding

Abstract

Age-related declines in attention and working memory (WM) are well documented and may be worsened by the occurrence of distracting information. Emotionally valenced stimuli may have particularly strong distracting effects on cognition. We investigated age-related differences in emotional distraction using task-fMRI. WM performance in older adults was lower for emotional compared with neutral distractors, suggesting a disproportional impairment elicited by emotional task-irrelevant information. Critically, older adults were particularly distracted by task-irrelevant positive information, whereas the opposite pattern was found for younger adults. Age groups differed markedly in the brain response to emotional distractors; younger adults activated posterior cortical regions and the striatum, and older adults activated frontal regions. Also, an age by valence interaction was found for IFG and ACC, suggesting differential modulation of attention to task-relevant emotional information. These results provide new insights into age-related changes in emotional processing and the ability to resolve interference from emotional distraction.