Age-related increase in top-down activation of visual features

Previous research suggests that, during visual search and discrimination tasks, older adults place greater emphasis than younger adults on top-down attention. This experiment investigated the relative contribution of target activation and distractor inhibition to this age difference. Younger and old...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) 2007-05, Vol.60 (5), p.644-651
Main Authors: Madden, David J., Spaniol, Julia, Bucur, Barbara, Whiting, Wythe L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Adolescent
Adult
Adult. Elderly
Age Factors
Aged
Aging - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Developmental psychology
Discrimination, Psychological
Female
Fixation, Ocular
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Health Status
Humans
Inhibition, Psychological
Male
Middle Aged
Perception
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Short
Vigilance. Attention. Sleep
Vision
Visual Fields - physiology
Visual Perception
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Summary:Previous research suggests that, during visual search and discrimination tasks, older adults place greater emphasis than younger adults on top-down attention. This experiment investigated the relative contribution of target activation and distractor inhibition to this age difference. Younger and older adults performed a singleton discrimination task in which either an E or an R target (colour singleton) was present among distractor letters. Relative to a baseline condition in which the colours of the targets and distractors remained constant, an age-related slowing of performance was evident when either the colour of the target or that of the distractors varied across trials. The age-related slowing was more pronounced in response to target colour variation, suggesting that older adults place relatively greater emphasis on the top-down activation of target features.
ISSN:1747-0218
1747-0226
DOI:10.1080/17470210601154347