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Description: In visual search tasks, distractor objects must be inhibited to successfully orient attention towards the target of the search. Older adults experience more difficulties in such tasks because their executive control, which underlies inhibitory responses, is likely impaired. In this study, we bring fresh evidences about the impact of cognitive ageing on the interplay between top-down contextual expectations and executive control mechanisms during search in naturalistic scenes. A young and an older group of participants had to find a target object varying in consistency with the search scene (e.g., a basket of bread or an iron in a restaurant scene) after being cued with another scene which was congruent or incongruent with it (e.g., a restaurant vs. a bathroom). They were also asked to complete two executive control tasks (Stroop and Flanker) to assess their individual inhibitory capacity. Our main result was that older adults found it harder to identify inconsistent objects when primed with congruent information. They also spent significantly more time to find an inconsistent target, and looked at it for longer to recognize it. Further analyses confirmed that these results were linked to the executive control capacity of our participants. Contextually congruent expectations have to be suppressed when the semantics of the target object violates them. The reduced executive control capacity in the older adults implied that they were less able to successfully suppress such irrelevant information hence explaining their greater difficulty as compared to young adults.