Paying attention: the cost of stress during aging?

Recent work provided evidence that cognitive decline, specifically working memory and inhibition, during aging is not strictly due to the aging process per se. It may be in part caused by the long term exposure to stress over a life time. Long-term exposure to cortisol damages both the frontal cortex and hippocampus but it appears the damage necessary to produce cognitive impairment only manifest during advanced aging. Attention, similar to working memory and inhibition, is processed in the frontal cortex, therefore, I continued this line of inquiry to test this stress/age interaction on attention. Across two studies I used the attentional blink task to test the stress/age interaction on performance on this task. I report mixed results for the interaction and discuss this in relation to the difficulty of measuring long-term stress.