The first component of the AST-mem required participants to look directly at the red target stimulus as quickly and accurately as possible, ignoring the green distracters, and then back to the center. In this way, the AST-mem condition eliminated the need for participants to actively inhibit the target, as required in the standard AST-s and in the AST-go/no-go task. In the second part of the task, however, the voluntary saccade was to be executed to the mirror-image location of the previous target location within a blank screen. This variant, the AST-mem condition, thus taxed spatial WM while minimizing the extent to which IC was to be exercised. To reduce the likelihood of older participants neglecting to respond at all, after the delay period (as might be expected according to advocates of the goal neglect hypothesis of aging, e.g., Duncan et al., 1996), a double cross-modality cue was presented to prompt participants to initiate the saccade: the visual offset of the central fixation stimulus, was presented simultaneously with an auditory beep. At the time of the subsequent voluntary saccade, the screen was completely blank, thus creating a situation likely to load more heavily onto WM, since no markers were present to aid the recollection of the previous target location, and the eye movement was programmed according to the spatial representation of the target location in memory. The presentation order of the composite screens in the AST memory-guided (AST-mem) condition is represented in Figure 1 (middle panel).