HHS HealthBeat (December 19, 2007)

Seniors paying attention

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Do older people get distracted more easily? Researcher Christina Hugenschmidt of Wake Forest University School of Medicine checked, by looking at multisensory attention – what you see while ignoring what you hear. 

Hugenschmidt tested how fast young adults and healthy seniors reacted to sights and sounds they’d been ignoring.

``When we compared the two groups, we did not find differences between them, which is actually not what we were expecting at all.’’  (5 seconds)

Hugenschmidt says her lab finding indicates the brains of healthy seniors have a lot of potential to learn to cope with distraction in the real world. Of course, in the real world, there could be a lot more distraction.

The study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, was presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: May, 26 2008