Auditory distraction, time perception, and the role of age: ERP evidence from a large cohort study

Cognitive aging is typically associated with a higher susceptibility to distraction by concurrent, but task-irrelevant stimuli. Here, we studied the cognitive sub-processes involved in a sample of 484 healthy adults aged 20–70 years from the Dortmund Vital Study (Clinicaltrials.gov NCT05155397). Participants judged the duration of tone stimuli of a random sequence of long and short tones, having either a regular (standard) pitch or rare (deviant) pitch. Deviance-related ERPs were explored, reflecting neuro-cognitive correlates of pre-attentive deviance detection (MMN), attention allocation toward (P3a) and processing of (P3b) the deviance, and re-orienting toward the task-relevant stimulus feature (RON). Accuracy was reduced for deviant long tones, possibly due to withdrawing attention from processing the time information, making long stimuli appear shorter. This effect increased with age, and cluster-based permutation tests on the correlation of ERPs and age as well as linear mixed modeling indicated a decrease in MMN, an increase in P3a with long tones, and decreases in P3b and RON. This suggests a greater attentional orienting to the deviant stimulus feature and a reduced re-orienting to the task-relevant feature with increasing age.