What is it about?
When something is hard to see, we lean on context to fill the gap. For example, older adults lean harder and sometimes report the word that the context predicted rather than the one actually shown: researchers previously named this "false seeing." But is this a failure of the eyes, or a shift in judgement stemming from the brain? We tuned the display for each person so that younger and older adults identified faint words equally well in this study, then used signal detection theory to separate how clearly someone saw from how readily they decided. The two groups saw equally well. What differed was the bar each set before committing to the expected word.
Featured Image
Photo by Age Cymru on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Conclude the cause cause would lead to incorrect solution. If older adults misread a label because their vision has declined, brighter light and larger type will help. If instead they are settling for less evidence before deciding, the useful levers are different ones, such as feedback, incentives, anything that shifts a decision threshold. Our results point to the second. They also carry a warning for the field: any study comparing perception across age groups must separate seeing from deciding, or it risks reporting a decision as a deficit
Perspectives
Comparisons of younger and older adults assume both groups face an equally hard task, however, they usually don't. We spent the first experiment matching difficulty person by person before testing anything else; and once it was matched, the two groups saw equally well. Only their decision criterion differed. Whether that criterion can be shifted by feedback or incentives is what we want to test next.
M. Eric Cui
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Age-related differences in the lexical priming effect can be predominantly attributed to differences in response bias., Psychology and Aging, January 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pag0000964.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
