Age-related changes in attention switching: Cognitive and sensory factors in selective listening

Age-related impairments in selective listening may result from a mixture of cognitive and sensory factors. This study used a task-switching variant of selective listening and compared performance of 47 younger and 47 older adults to investigate auditory attention switching and target-distractor segregation across two experimental sessions. In each session, participants also completed a pure-tone audiometry to assess hearing capacity. In each experimental trial, two words were played from separate locations. Guided by visual cues, participants categorized the target speech at the cued location while ignoring the distractor speech. Results revealed robust age-related slowing. Both groups showed performance costs when the target location switched across sequential trials (i.e., switch costs). However, even after accounting for individual differences in hearing capacity, older adults exhibited greater switch costs, suggesting an age-related deficit in cognitive control. Moreover, while younger adults showed reduced switch costs across sessions, older adults showed little to no decrease, indicating constrained adaptation to flexible task demands. Furthermore, age-related differences in the congruency effect (i.e., reflecting target-distractor segregation) emerged primarily during switch trials, driven by older adults' increased distractor interference under conditions requiring attention switching. Although in the error rates switching auditory attention may be partially compromised by nonpathological levels of hearing loss, sensory decline alone could not fully account for the age-related performance differences observed in our cued selective listening task, likely reflecting deficits in cognitive control of attention. Together, these findings underscore the impact of cognitive factors on older adults' ability to switch auditory attention and segregate competing auditory information independent of age-related sensory differences in hearing capacity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).