When do we become more distractible? Progressive evolution of different components of distractibility from early to late adulthood.

Distractibility determines the propensity to have one's attention captured by irrelevant information; it relies on a balance between voluntary and involuntary attention. We report a cross-sectional study that uses the competitive attention test to characterize patterns of attention across the adult life span from 21 to 86 years old. Several distractibility components were measured in 186 participants distributed within seven age groups.

Visual working memory recruits two functionally distinct alpha rhythms in posterior cortex.

Oscillatory activity in the human brain is dominated by posterior alpha oscillations (8-14 Hz), which have been shown to be functionally relevant in a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Although posterior alpha oscillations are commonly considered a single oscillator anchored at an individual alpha frequency (IAF; ∼10 Hz), previous work suggests that IAF reflects a spatial mixture of different brain rhythms. In this study, we assess whether Independent Component Analysis (ICA) can disentangle functionally distinct posterior alpha rhythms in the context of visual short-term memory retention.