Aging modulates the effects of scene complexity on visual search and target selection in virtual environments

Abstract

Processing task-relevant visual information is important for the successful completion of many everyday tasks. Prior work demonstrated that aging is associated with increased susceptibility to distraction by salient stimuli. However, these studies often use simple stimuli and little is known about how aging influences visual attention in 3D environments that are more representative of real-world visual complexity. We asked young and older adults to complete a virtual reality-based visual search task with three levels of increasing visual complexity. As the visual complexity of the environment increased, all participants took longer to complete the task, in part because they increased the time spent re-fixating task-relevant objects and the time spent fixating task-irrelevant objects. We also found that older adults took longer to complete the task and spent more time re-fixating task-relevant objects and fixating task-irrelevant objects. In addition, we found that short-term and working memory capacities were related to multiple measures of performance in the visual search task. These results demonstrate the importance of assessing the effects of aging on the control of visual attention using tasks and environments that better capture features of the real world.