Remembering frequently occurs in the context of other competing activities. When trying to encode or retrieve information in everyday situations, we often do so amidst ongoing relevant and irrelevant information and concurrent events. This array of competing contextual stimulation may capture our attention and interfere with our ability to remember efficiently the information on which we would like to focus. In the present studies, we examined the effects of divided attention in a long-term memory task and looked at differences in the degree to which subjects of different ages were affected by this distraction. We were particularly interested in whether there were age-related differences in the effect of competing tasks during encoding, during retrieval, or during both.
