NDLI: Age-related inhibitory deficit, or lack of familiarity benefit? Evidence from letter identification among visual distractors

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Rabaglia, Cristina D. Schneider, Bruce A.
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Age-related deficits in processing complex visual scenes are often attributed to age-related declines in the cognitive abilities required for such tasks. For example, poorer or slower performance of a complex task in the presence of distractor items is often attributed to an age-related deficit in the ability to inhibit the processing of irrelevant information. To investigate the relative contributions of sensory and cognitive factors in such tasks, younger and older participants were asked to identify a letter presented simultaneously with distractors that were either other letters, pieces of letters, or visual noise controls with identical spatial frequency content or contrast profile. In Experiment 1, older adults performed much worse than younger adults when the masking field consisted of other letters. Surprisingly—and contrary to the predictions of inhibitory deficit or visual “pop-out” phenomena—this effect emerged because younger adults performed much better with letter-containing maskers than with any other type of masker, whereas older adults did not. Experiment 2 revealed that age-related changes in the time required to process the visual display do not appear to account for this effect. In Experiment 3, however, we replicated older adults’ task performance in a younger adult sample by filtering the experimental stimuli to match the image contrast typically experienced by an older adult. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that age-related differences in task performance amidst distractors can emerge from age-related declines in contrast sensitivity, which set older adults up to fail at tasks in which younger adults may typically be able to benefit from the familiarity of the target and surrounding objects.
Starting Page	542
Ending Page	565
Page Count	24
File Format	PDF
ISSN	19433921
Journal	Perception & Psychophysics
Volume Number	78
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	1943393X
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2015-11-05
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Aging Inhibitory deficit Visual object formation Sensory–cognitive interactions Letter identification Cognitive Psychology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Sensory Systems Linguistics and Language

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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