This study examined adult age differences in reflexive orienting to two types of uninformative spatial cues: central arrows and peripheral onsets. In two experiments using a Posner cuing task, young adults (ages 18 – 28 yrs), young-old adults (ages 60 – 74 yrs), and old-old adults (ages 75 – 92 yrs) responded to targets that were preceded 100–1,000 ms earlier by a central arrow or a peripheral abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the cue remained present upon target onset. Facilitation effects at early cue-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) were prolonged in duration for the two older groups relative to the young adults. At later cue-target SOAs, inhibition of return (IOR) that was initiated by peripheral onset cues was observed in the performance of young adults but not in that of the two older groups. In Experiment 2, the cue was presented briefly and removed prior to target onset. The change in cue duration minimized age differences (particularly for young-old adults) in facilitation effects and led to IOR for all three age groups. The findings are consistent with the idea that attentional control settings change with age, with higher settings for older adults leading to delayed disengagement from spatial cues.

Face recognition depends on visual experience in a number of different ways. Infrequent exposure to faces belonging to categories defined by species, age, or race can lead to diminished memory for and discrimination between members of those categories relative to faces belonging to categories that dominate an observer's environment. Early visual impairment can also have long-lasting and broad effects on face discrimination – just a few months of visual impairment due to congenital cataracts can lead to diminished discrimination between faces that differ in their configuration, for example (Le Grand et al. 2001). Presently, we consider a novel aspect of visual experience that may impact face recognition: The approximate amount of different faces observers encountered during their childhood. We recruited undergraduate observers from small (500-1000 individuals) and large communities (30,000-100,000 individuals) and asked them to complete a standard face memory test and a basic ERP paradigm designed to elicit a robust N170 response, including the classic face inversion effect. We predicted that growing up in a small community might lead to diminished face memory and an N170 response that was less specific to faces. These predictions were confirmed, suggesting that the sheer number of faces one can interact with during their upbringing shapes their behavioral abilities and the functional architecture of face processing in the brain.

Face exposure during development determines adults' abilities to recognize faces and the information they use to process them. Individual differences in the face categories represented in the visual environment can lead to category-specific deficits for recognizing faces that are atypical of observer's experience (e.g. the other-race effect). But what happens when observers have limited opportunities to learn about faces in general? In previous work, we found that observers from depopulated areas have poorer face recognition performance than observers from larger communities, suggesting that impoverished face experience limits face processing broadly. Here, we further investigate this phenomenon by examining how hometown size impacts the ability to assess appearance variability in natural images of faces and bodies. We asked individuals from small and large communities to complete (1) an unconstrained card-sorting task designed to test observers' ability to categorize within-person and between-person appearance variability properly, and (2) the Cambridge Face Memory Test. For both tasks, we examined the direct comparison between groups as well as the relationship between CFMT scores and sorting performance as a function of face experience. We find that small-town observers perform more poorly on the CFMT, but exhibit both better and worse performance than large-town observers on different aspects of the card-sorting task. Further, we also examine the relationship between CFMT performance and card-sorting errors. Our results suggest that individual differences in lifetime face exposure induce important variation in face processing abilities.

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of attentional orienting that is indexed by slower responses to targets presented at previously attended locations. The purpose of this study was to examine adult age differences in the distribution of IOR to multiple locations. In three experiments, young adults (ages 18-30 years) and older adults (ages 60-87 years) completed an IOR task that varied in the number of simultaneous onset cues (one to seven) and the number of display locations (four or eight). Analyses were conducted to explore whether IOR patterns were most consistent with limited inhibitory resources, with regional distribution of inhibition, or with vector averaging of cues. The IOR effects were most consistent with vector averaging, such that multiple cues initiated a directional gradient of inhibition centered on the average direction of the cues. The IOR patterns varied minimally with age, consistent with the conclusion that older adults and young adults distributed inhibition in a similar manner.