Abstract
It is known that older adults, but not young adults, show priming of distractor words following a picture identification task. One possible explanation is the hypothesis that cognitive aging is caused by age-related functional declines in inhibition. Based on previous studies of cultural psychology, we have been investigating the interaction between cultural and aging effects on contextual/distractor information processing, expecting that East Asian participants might show a different cognitive profile for inhibition of distracting information. Two experiments have been executed with Japanese older participants following the same experimental procedure as Rowe et al. (2006). We found results that older adults showed no priming effects of distractor words with Kanji Perceptual Identification Task. Because only younger Japanese adults exhibited priming effects with Word Fragment Completion task (Harada & Asano, 2010, Exp. 1), hypothetical differences in language processing between English and Japanese and their interactions with aging are discussed.
