Adult age differences in the use of distractor homogeneity during visual search.

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

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.11.3.454

Cited by 62 publications

(94 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(126 reference statements)

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“…Older adults' preserved ability to improve performance in this task supports previous investigations of visual search that used variation in the featural composition of the displays to elicit top-down control (Humphrey & Kramer, 1997;Madden et al, 1996). The data for nonsingleton targets are consistent with previous research indicating that under some conditions attentional capture by a singleton is more pronounced for older adults than for younger adults (Kramer et al, 2000;Pratt & Bellomo, 1999).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Age-Related Preservation of Top-Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search.

Madden

Whiting

Cabeza

et al. 2004

Psychology and Aging

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Younger (19 -27 years of age) and older (60 -82 years of age) adults performed a letter search task in which a color singleton was either noninformative (baseline condition) or highly informative (guided condition) regarding target location. In the guided condition, both age groups exhibited a substantial decrease in response time (RT) to singleton targets, relative to the baseline condition, as well as an increase in RT to nonsingleton targets. The authors conclude that under conditions that equate the physical structure of individual displays, top-down attentional guidance can be at least as effective for older adults as for younger adults.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Age-Related Preservation of Top-Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search.

Madden

Whiting

Cabeza

et al. 2004

Psychology and Aging

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“…This type of age-related change has been observed frequently under resource-limited conditions and can be accounted for by general (relatively task-independent) changes in the speed of visual information processing (Madden, 2001;Madden et al, 1996;Plude & Hoyer, 1986). It is also interesting to note that the degree of age-related slowing, in terms of the ratio of older adults' RT slopes to those of the younger adults, decreased markedly from Experiment 1 (1.71) to Experiment 2 (1.25).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related changes in selective attention and perceptual load during visual search.

Madden¹,

Langley²

2003

Psychology and Aging

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Three visual search experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that age differences in selective attention vary as a function of perceptual load (E. A. Maylor & N. Lavie, 1998). Under resourcelimited conditions (Experiments 1 and 2), the distraction from irrelevant display items generally decreased as display size (perceptual load) increased. This perceptual load effect was similar for younger and older adults, contrary to the findings of Maylor and Lavie. Distraction at low perceptual loads appeared to reflect both general and specific inhibitory mechanisms. Under more data-limited conditions (Experiment 3), an age-related decline in selective attention was evident, but the age difference was not attributable to capacity limitations as predicted by the perceptual load theory.An age-related decline is frequently evident in the overall efficiency of visual search performance, but the selective allocation of attention to task-relevant information, expressed as changes in performance associated with target-location and target-identity cues, is in many respects constant as a function of age (Hartley, 1992;Madden & Plude, 1993;McDowd & Shaw, 2000). Selection performance on nonsearch measures of attention, including Stroop, negative-priming, and response compatibility tasks, has exhibited variability in age-related patterns of stability and decline as a function of specific task demands. Investigations of response compatibility effects, for example, have found that the increase in reaction time (RT) associated with response-incompatible flankers is greater for older adults than for younger

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“…In contrast to other studies that used time constraints for stimulus presentation and reported global precedence effects (Navon, 1977;Slavin et al, 2002;Weissman et al, 2002), stimuli in the present study remained on the screen until the subject pressed the response button. This procedure ensured sufficient processing time for older participants, who commonly have prolonged RTs (Cabeza, 2001;Madden et al, 1996;Salthouse, 1996) as they did herein, but may also have afforded time to process beyond the global level. Further, in our paradigm black local letters were superimposed on a gray global letter presented on white background.…”

Section: Precedence Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Earlier accounts assumed that such interference results from the processing priority of global features, i.e., global precedence, in which processing at the global level either precedes or finishes earlier than processing at the local level (e.g., Navon, 1977). Current theories assume parallel and concurrent processing of the different dimensions of local-global stimuli (Hoffman, 1980;Madden et al, 1996), where global interference arises from the inhibition of local pathways by those carrying global information (Christman, 2001;Hughes, 1986;Kitterle et al, 1993). Evidence from brain lesion studies (Delis et al, 1986(Delis et al, ,1988Robertson et al, 1988Yamaguchi et al, 2000) and neuroimaging studies in healthy participants (Evans et al, 2000;Fink et al, 1996Fink et al, ,1999Han et al, 2002;Weber et al, 2000;Yamaguchi et al, 2000) indicates that local and global processing proceeds in parallel, with the left hemisphere assuming a local and the right hemisphere a global processing advantage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local–global interference is modulated by age, sex and anterior corpus callosum size

et al. 2007

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To identify attentional and neural mechanisms affecting global and local feature extraction, we devised a global-local hierarchical letter paradigm to test the hypothesis that aging reduces functional cerebral lateralization through corpus callosum (CC) degradation. Participants (37 men and women, 26-79 years) performed a task requiring global, local, or global+local attention and underwent structural MRI for CC measurement. Although reaction time (RT) slowed with age, all participants had faster RTs to local than global targets. This local precedence effect together with greater interference from incongruent local information and greater response conflict from local targets each correlated with older age and smaller callosal genu (anterior) areas. These findings support the hypothesis that the CC mediates lateralized local-global processes by inhibition of task-irrelevant information under selective attention conditions. Further, with advancing age smaller genu size leads to less robust inhibition, thereby reducing cerebral lateralization and permitting interference to influence processing. Sex was an additional modifier of interference, in that callosum-interference relationships were evident in women but not in men. Regardless of age, smaller splenium (posterior) areas correlated with less response facilitation from repetition priming of global targets in men, but with greater response facilitation from repetition priming of local targets in women. Our data indicate the following dissociation: Anterior callosal structure was associated with inhibitory processes (i.e., interference from incongruency and response conflict), which are vulnerable to the effects of age and sex, whereas posterior callosal structure was associated with facilitation processes from repetition priming dependent on sex and independent of age.

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Adult age differences in the use of distractor homogeneity during visual search.

Cited by 62 publications

References 33 publications

Age-Related Preservation of Top-Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search.

Age-Related Preservation of Top-Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search.

Age-related changes in selective attention and perceptual load during visual search.

Local–global interference is modulated by age, sex and anterior corpus callosum size

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