Senior Citizen

If you're a senior citizen, music in the background may be distracting. But for younger people — experts at multitasking — it's apparently no big deal. That's according to a study in the journal Gerontologist. Researchers 1 103 people — half between the ages of 18 and 30, the others between 60 and 75. The 2 then took part in memorization exercises and a drill where they had to quickly match a photo of a face with the same face in an array of 3 faces. Some participants did the exercises in silence. Others performed the tasks while listening to white noise or 4 jazz, blues, classical and electronic music. Across age groups, the consensus was that the background sound was distracting-but only older people's performance 5 when the noise was present. For example, older folks who did the face-matching with music playing remembered 10 percent fewer faces. The result matches up with the theory that the elderly are less able to filter out what's called “distracting task-irrelevant information.” In this case the distracting info might have interfered with them storing the facial image in the first place — much less impeding their ability to remember it a short while later.