Education does not protect against age-related decline of switching focal attention in working memory q Pascal W.M. Van Gerven a, * , Willemien A. Meijer b , Jelle Jolles a,b a Maastricht University, Faculty of Psychology, Department of Neurocognition, Maastricht, The Netherlands b Maastricht University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, Maastricht, The Netherlands Accepted 7 February 2007 Available online 29 March 2007 Abstract In this experimental study, effects of age and education on switching focal attention in working memory were investigated among 44 young (20–30 years) and 40 middle-aged individuals (50–60 years). To this end, a numeric n-back task comprising two lag conditions (1- and 2-back) was administered within groups. The results revealed a comparable increase of reaction time as a function of lag across age groups, but a disproportionate decrease of accuracy in the middle-aged relative to the young group. The latter effect did not interact with education, which challenges the cognitive reserve hypothesis. Moreover, the high-educated middle-aged participants showed a greater increase of reaction time as a function of lag than their low-educated counterparts. Apparently, they were not able to sustain their rel- atively high response speed across conditions. These results suggest that education does not protect against age-related decline of switch- ing focal attention in working memory. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Aging; Cognitive reserve; Education; Working memory; Focal attention 1. Introduction Focal attention in working memory is a relatively new concept in cognitive aging research. It was only recently added to the range of elementary cognitive control mecha- nisms that are compromised in older individuals (Verhaeg- hen & Basak, 2005; Verhaeghen et al., 2007; Verhaeghen, Cerella, Bopp, & Basak, 2005; Verhaeghen & Hoyer, 2007). The ‘‘focus of attention’’ (Cowan, 1988) can be defined as that part of working memory that is currently being processed. Other parts of working memory remain in the so-called ‘‘region of immediate access.’’ The capacity of focal attention is limited. Some researchers even assert that it does not exceed a single item (e.g., Garavan, 1998; McElree, 2001; but see Verhaeghen, Cerella, & Basak, 2004). Therefore, tasks with changing target items require switches of focal attention. Switching focal attention involves costs in terms of increased response time and reduced accuracy (McElree, 2001). Verhaeghen and Basak (2005) found accuracy costs to be larger in older (mean age = 72.15 years) than in younger individuals (mean age = 18.79 years). The main question of the present study is whether the reduced ability of older individuals to switch focal atten- tion is determined by the level of educational achievement. Education is a well-established proxy of ‘‘cognitive reserve,’’ a hypothetical construct referring to the ability of an individual to cope with age-related brain decline by employing compensatory strategies and recruiting alterna- tive neural networks (e.g., Staff, Murray, Deary, & Whal- ley, 2004; Stern, 2002). Recently, cognitive reserve was 0278-2626/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2007.02.005 q We thank Renate de Groot and Ron Keulen for their excellent organizational support during this project. Anita van Oers is gratefully acknowledged for programming the E-Prime tasks. We also thank Lia Baars and Angelique Gijsen for testing the participants. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this article. * Corresponding author. Fax: +31 43 3884125. E-mail address: p.vangerven@psychology.unimaas.nl (P.W.M. Van Gerven). www.elsevier.com/locate/b&c Brain and Cognition 64 (2007) 158–163