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

• 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
• ISSN: 1747-0218; 1747-0226
• DOI: 10.1080/17470210601154347

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.