Support for the notion that what is stored is an abstracted representation of the original stimulus comes from studies that demonstrate that after a passage is read, it takes subjects the same amount of time to verify information originally presented in a complex linguistic format as it does to verify that same information present in a simpler format.
Performance on 2 neuropsychological measures changes over the day, at least for older adults, and is correlated with inhibitory indexes, suggesting that for Older adults changes in inhibition may be mediated by circadian variations in frontal functioning.
A variety of findings indicated that this age group is less able than younger adults to suppress the processing and retrieval of items designated as to be forgotten (TBF).
Reading time measures indicated that compared with younger adults, older adults have a more difficult time ignoring the distracting information, particularly information meaningfully related to target text.
The results suggest that span is influenced by interference, that age differences in span may be due to Differences in the ability to overcome interference rather than to differences in capacity, and that interference plays an important role in the relation between span and other tasks.