Age-related increase in top-down activation of visual features |
| |
Authors: | Madden David J Spaniol Julia Bucur Barbara Whiting Wythe L |
| |
Institution: |
a Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA
b Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, USA |
| |
Abstract: | 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. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 InformaWorld PubMed 等数据库收录! |
|