Adult age differences in attentional allocation during memory search.

Madden, David J.; Pierce, Thomas W.; Allen, Philip A.

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.7.4.594

Cited by 78 publications

(106 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Although this concern is valid, exceptions to the general pattern were detected in both the Madden et al (1992) and the Salthouse and Kersten (1993) studies. For example, in the Salthouse and Kersten (1993) study, the time taken by older adults to perform the Digit Symbol reaction time task after an opportunity to learn the associations between digit-symbol pairs was greater than that expected from the systematic relation.…”

Section: Analyses Of Systematic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…"General" or "common" in this context thus implies lack of independence, in the sense that knowing the magnitude of the age differences on one variable provides information about the magnitude of the age differences on other variables. (Salthouse, 1992d, p. 330) One application of systematic relation analyses to distinguish common and unique age-related influences was described by Madden et al (1992;see also 1993). These investigators used the performance of young adults and the systematic relations from a set of variables to predict the mean values of older adults in a given condition.…”

Section: Analyses Of Systematic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, there has been considerable interest, and controversy, regarding the existence and interpretation of systematic relations between mean levels of performance in different age groups (e.g., Cerella, 1985Cerella, , 1990Cerella, ,1991Cerella, ,1994Fisk& Fisher, 1994;Fisk, Fisher, & Rogers, 1992;Laver & Burke, 1993;Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 1992, 1993Myerson, Hale, Wagstaff, Poon, & Smith, 1990;Myerson, Wagstaff, & Hale, 1994;Perfect, 1994). The method of examining age-comparative data in which the task or condition means of one group are plotted against those of another group was originally described by Brinley (1965), who used it to express relations with both accuracy measures and speed measures.…”

Section: Analyses Of Systematic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition.

Salthouse¹

1996

Psychological Review

4,723

316

3,677

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A theory is proposed to account for some of the age-related differences reported in measures of Type A or fluid cognition. The central hypothesis in the theory is that increased age in adulthood is associated with a decrease in the speed with which many processing operations can be executed and that this reduction in speed leads to impairments in cognitive functioning because of what are termed the limited time mechanism and the simultaneity mechanism. That is, cognitive performance is degraded when processing is slow because relevant operations cannot be successfully executed (limited time) and because the products of early processing may no longer be available when later processing is complete (simultaneity). Several types of evidence, such as the discovery of considerable shared age-related variance across various measures of speed and large attenuation of the age-related influences on cognitive measures after statistical control of measures of speed, are consistent with this theory.The purpose of the current article is to describe, and discuss the evidence relevant to, the processing-speed theory of cognitive aging phenomena. The fundamental assumption in the theory is that a major factor contributing to age-related differences in memory and other aspects of cognitive functioning is a reduction with increased age in the speed with which many cognitive operations can be executed (Salthouse, 1985b). In this article, discussion of evidence relevant to the theory is restricted to the adult portion of the life span, but the basic mechanism may be relevant across the entire life span because similar ideas have been proposed by Kail (e.g., 1986Kail (e.g., , 1991Kail & Park, 1992) regarding the development of cognitive functioning during childhood.Because the success of a theory cannot be evaluated if the goal one hopes to achieve is never clearly specified, I begin by briefly describing the phenomenon that the present theory is intended to explain. Some of the best-documented findings in the literature on aging and cognition are the age-related differences in Type A (Hebb, 1942) or fluid (Cattell, 1943;Horn, 1982;Horn & Cattell, 1963) cognition, which include a wide variety of measures of memory, reasoning, and spatial abilities. The relations between age and cognition have been well documented since the earliest mental testing of adults (e.g., Foster & Taylor, 1920;Jones & Conrad, 1933), and they are readily apparent in the results from the standardization data in psychometric and neuropsychological test batteries (e.g., see Salthouse, 1991c, chap. 2, for a review). Because the samples for the standardization data in these test batteries are typically large and representative, and because the performance measures are Preparation of this article was supported by National Institute on Aging Grant R37 AG06826.1 would like to thank John Dunlosky, Julie Earles, Dan Fisk, Leah Light, Ulman Lindenberger, and David Madden for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.Correspondence concerning this article sho...

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Section: Analyses Of Systematic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Analyses Of Systematic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Analyses Of Systematic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition.

Salthouse¹

1996

Psychological Review

4,723

316

3,677

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This has been taken as evidence for a decrease in the speed of processing with age. This view has received much support (e.g., Birren, 1965;Cerella, 1985Cerella, , 1990Cerella, Poon, & Williams, 1980;Fisk & Warr, 1996;Salthouse, 1985Salthouse, , 1996Salthouse, Kausler, & Saults, 1988) and much criticism and debate (Allen, Ashcraft, & Weber, 1992;Allen et al, 1993;Cerella, 1994;Fisk & Fisher, 1994;Fisher & Glaser, 1996;Hartley, 1992;Hertzog, 1992;Lima et al, 1991;Madden, 1989;Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 1992;Myerson et al, 1992;Myerson, Wagstaff, & Hale, 1994;Perfect, 1994). Ratcliff, Spieler, and McKoon (2000) argued against this view from a theoretical perspective by showing that in the frameworks of explicit models, there are multiple ways that slowing in mean RT can be produced, such as changes in the rate of accumulation of evidence, decision criteria settings, or both.…”

Section: Brinley Plotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Diffusion Model Analysis of the Effects of Aging in the Lexical-Decision Task.

Ratcliff¹,

Thapar²,

Gómez³

et al. 2004

Psychology and Aging

278

329

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The effects of aging on response time (RT) are examined in 2 lexical-decision experiments with young and older subjects (age 60-75). The results show that the older subjects were slower than the young subjects, but more accurate. R. diffusion model provided a good account of RTs, their distributions, and response accuracy. The fits show an 80-100-ms slowing of the nondecision components of RT for older subjects relative to young subjects and more conservative decision criterion settings for older subjects than for young subjects. The rates of accumulation of evidence were not significantly different for older compared with young subjects (less than 2% and 5% higher for older subjects relative to young subjects in the 2 experiments).Across a wide variety of cognitive tasks, research has shown that processing slows with age. For some tasks, especially those like letter discrimination that depend heavily on peripheral processes, this is not surprising (e.g., . However, for other tasks it might be expected that performance would improve with age. One such task is lexical decision, the task of interest in this article. Over a lifetime of 60 to 70 years, the number of encounters with many words must greatly exceed the number of encounters in the first 20 years. Yet despite so many years of practice, lexical-decision response times (RTs) increase with age. For example, Allen, Madden, and Crozier (1991) found average RTs of 800 ms for older adults compared with 500 ms for young adults. Word frequency effects, longer RTs with lower frequency words, are also larger for older adults (see Allen et al., 1991;Allen, Madden, Weber, & Groth, 1993;Allen, Sliwinski, & Bowie, 2002;Lima, Hale, & Myerson, 1991).Recently, Ratcliff, Gomez, and McKoon (2004) have applied the diffusion model for twochoice decisions (Ratcliff, 1978(Ratcliff, , 1981(Ratcliff, , 1985(Ratcliff, , 1988(Ratcliff, , 2002Ratcliff & Rouder, 1998Ratcliff & Smith, 2004;Ratcliff, Van Zandt, & McKoon, 1999) to lexical-decision data. The model allows processing to be separated into several components: the rate at which information about the stimulus string of letters accumulates in the decision system (which reflects the goodness of match between the test string and lexical memory), the criteria that determine the amounts of information that must be accumulated before a decision can be made, nondecision

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“…This ANOVA indicated the same pattern of results. Finally, in the same manner as Madden, Whiting, Cabeza, and Huettel (2004), we transformed the younger adults' RT data by the Brinley plot function characterizing the relation between the task condition means of the two age groups (Cerella, 1990;Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 1992). The Brinley function for the four task condition means in our experiment yielded Equation 1 (r 2 = .99).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Salient Natural Scene Attracts Both Younger and Older Adults’ Attention

Otsuka

Kawaguchi

2014

PSYCHOLOGIA -An International Journal of Psychological Sciences

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The purpose of this study was to examine whether salient natural scenes attract both younger and older adults' attention in a visual search task. We manipulated the search set size and the perceptual saliency of the target scene (singleton vs. nonsingleton). In the singleton condition, a target image was always presented in color, and distractors were presented in grayscale. In the nonsingleton condition, both target and distractor images were presented in color. Younger and older adults were asked to detect the target in scenes and to categorize it as an animal or vehicle. The results showed that, although older adults' decisions were slower than those of younger adults, older adults could still perform visual search efficiently in the singleton condition as compared with the nonsingleton condition. These results suggest that salient natural scenes attract both younger and older adults' attention in scene perception based on the relatively bottom-up attentional processing.Key oodds: K age-related difference, attentional attraction, scene perceptionIn visual search, the observer is faced with the task of sifting through multiple features of stimuli to find a target. The most robust finding of visual search research is that search efficiency depends on the nature and combinations of features in the display. In studies of visual search, both bottom-up and top-down attentional controls are important (e.g., Wolfe, 1998). Remington, Johnston, and Yantis (1992) demonstrated that abrupt onsets of visual stimuli capture attention in a bottom-up way. In their experiments, participants were explicitly told that onsets would never cue the location of the target and were to be ignored. However, despite these instructions, search was slowed whenever an onset was presented in the display. In addition, Theeuwes (1992) required participants to search for a green circle among green squares. In that experiment, an irrelevant color singleton, which differs from homogenous distractors on a particular dimension, was presented on some trials (e.g., one of the squares was red), and search was disrupted. Even though participants had a clear attentional set to attend to a shape singleton, the irrelevant color singleton captured attention involuntarily. These findings indicate that abrupt onsets or new objects capture attention in a mandatory form. In contrast, in a top-down form, visual search is influenced relatively by the observer's knowledge and goals than by the properties of the display. Leber and

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Adult age differences in attentional allocation during memory search.

Cited by 78 publications

References 24 publications

The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition.

The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition.

A Diffusion Model Analysis of the Effects of Aging in the Lexical-Decision Task.

Salient Natural Scene Attracts Both Younger and Older Adults’ Attention

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