What is it about?
Normal aging is associated with changes in the visual pathway and brain. These impact performance across a range of visual tasks, including search (the ability to find a target among non-target objects in the scene). In everyday life, search is often informed by knowledge about the target’s features (i.e., the colour of your phone case or an icon on your screen), however, little is known about how ageing affects individuals’ use of this knowledge to maximise the speed and accuracy of search. In this study, we used cues to manipulate the availability of information about the target’s colour to compare the impact of prior information on selectivity of eye movements during search in young and older adults.
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Why is it important?
Visual search requires the integration of information in short-term memory and the visual scene. Ageing is associated with declines in the speed and accuracy of search, and it is important to understand the processes that affect older adults’ ability to use information in short-term memory to optimise the effectiveness of search. Eye movement recording provides moment-by-moment measures that can be used to identify age-related differences in processes that support the selection and evaluation of objects during search. Our results indicate older adults are less likely to use information about the target’s colour to restrict eye movements to the subset of objects most likely to contain the target during search. This decreases the selectivity of eye movements and increases the time taken to find the target in older compared to young adults.
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This page is a summary of: Age-related differences in saccadic indices of top–down guidance via short-term memory during visual search., Psychology and Aging, May 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pag0000825.
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