How aging affects the reading of words in noisy backgrounds

Young and old adults were shown simple sentences masked by visual noise. In half of the sentences, the final word was predictable; in the other half, it was not. The older participants were able to identify the same number of final words as the younger ones only when the intensity of the visual noise was significantly diminished. However, the difference in the number of correct identifications between predictable and unpredictable conditions was higher for the older observers than for the younger observers, indicating that older observers benefit from context more.