Same-different judgments of foveal and parafoveal letter pairs by older adults

Krueger, Lester E.; Allen, Philip A.

doi:10.3758/bf03208234

Cited by 39 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…One possible reason for this discrepancy might be that the present subjects were considerably older thanthose in the Kinchla and Wolfe study. Age differences can have a dramatic effect on performance in RT tasks (Krueger & Allen, 1987). However, recent findings from our laboratory suggest that age is not the crucial factor in this case .…”

Section: Apparatus and Stimulimentioning

confidence: 40%

Do response time advantage and interference reflect the order of processing of global- and local-level information?

Lamb

Robertson

1989

Perception & Psychophysics

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Navon's (1977) global precedence hypothesis was based primarily on the joint occurrence of two effects: a response time (RT) advantage for identifying global targets, and interference by global distractors on responding to local targets. Although the hypothesis has been questioned on the basis of experiments in which it has been shown that a local RT advantage and local interference can occur, it is still frequently assumed that these two effects are a valid measure of the order in which local and global levels of structure are processed. In the present experiment, this assumption was examined. Subjects identified target letters that occurred randomly at the global or local level in a divided-attention task. The visual angle subtended by the stimulus pattern was varied, a manipulation known to affect the relative speed of response to local-or global-level information. Local targets were identified faster than global targets at the larger visual angles, but there was no difference in RT at the smallest visual angle. Despite this change in RT advantage, the interference effect did not change as a function of the visual angle of the stimulus pattern. Moreover, global distractors interfered with responding to local targets but local targets had no effect on responding to global targets, which is exactly the opposite of the finding one would expect if RT advantage and interference reflected order of processing. These findings are not consistent with the assumption that RT advantage and interference reflect order of processing in a simple way.The global precedence hypothesis (Navon 1977(Navon , 1981 asserts that global-level information is processed before local-level information and has been based primarily on the joint occurrence of two effects: a global advantage in response time (RT), and global interference. In a number of studies, it has been found that subjects identify global targets (e.g., the large letters in Figure 1) more quickly than they identify local targets (e.g., the small letters in Figure 1). At the same time, global distractors slow responses to local targets, but local distractors have little or no effect on responses to global targets. The fact that global information interferes with the local response but not vice versa has been taken as evidence that information at the global level is present at the time of the local response but not the reverse.Although these two effects (i.e., a global advantage in RT, and global interference) have frequently been reported (Boer & Keuss, 1982;Grice, Canham, & Boroughs, 1983;Martin, 1979a;Navon, 1977;Navon & Norman, 1983;Pomerantz, 1983), they are by no means universal. Changes in the relative discriminability oflocal and global forms, the sparsity oflocal forms, the size or brightness of the stimulus pattern, and where on the retina the stimulus impinges have all been shown to produce a reduction or reversal in the global advantage in RT accompaniedby a reductionor reversal of global interference (Boer & Keuss, 1982;Grice et al., 1983;Kinchla & Wolfe, 1979...

show abstract

Section: Apparatus and Stimulimentioning

confidence: 40%

Do response time advantage and interference reflect the order of processing of global- and local-level information?

Lamb

Robertson

1989

Perception & Psychophysics

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, proportional age effects will be largest here. Krueger (1984;Krueger & Allen, 1987) made a similar argument with respect to the skewness of the latency distribution that was due to rechecking in the context of perceptual matching. To conclude, the increase of old-young ratios across accuracy criteria in coordinative complexity conditions is compatible with the assumption of old adults' working memory problems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Therefore, we expect proportional age effects in terms of time demands to be larger in coordinative complexity than in sequential complexity conditions. There is a bulk of evidence suggesting age-related decline in aspects of working memory functioning (for recent reviews see Light, 1991;Salthouse, 1990). Old adults exhibit lower performance than young adults on almost every task that theoretically involves working memory, such as reasoning (Welford, 1958), language production and comprehension (Kemper, 1987), mental calculation (Charness & Campbell, 1988), or mental rotation (Hertzog & Rypma, 1991).…”

Section: Sequential and Coordinative Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential and coordinative complexity: Age-based processing limitations in figural transformations.

Mayr¹,

Kliegl²

1993

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

124

144

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This has been shown to protect older adults from the influence ofdistractors presented at wide interletter distances, especially when letter size is small (e.g., CerelIa, 1985;Hartley & McKenzie, 1991). Within foveal view, evidence from letter-and shapematching tasks has shown consistent age-related decrements in perceptual processing (Allen, Weber, & Madden, 1994;Allen, Weber, & May, 1993;Krueger & Allen, 1987; see also Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 1993). For example, Allen et al (1994) found a larger falsedifferent effect for errors in which older adults were more likely to say that two identical letters are different.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The functional interaction of visual-perceptual and response mechanisms during selective attention in young adults, young-old adults, and old-old adults

Sullivan

1999

Perception & Psychophysics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A response compatibility paradigm was employed to address how the perceptual and response activation processes functionally interact during selective attention and how they may be influenced by aging. The results showed that increasing the visual similarity of targets within response sets reduced the magnitude of the interference effect, but only with a narrow interletter distance. In a dissimilar condition, the magnitude of the interference effect did not vary with age. However, in a similar condition, the magnitude of the interference effect was larger for both young (l~O years) and young-old adults (55-79 years) than for old-old adults (~80 years). In contrast, all three groups showed similar facilitation effects. These results failed to provide support for the notion that enhanced spatial filtering of the target from the flankers produces a corresponding decrease in response competition. Rather, the decrease in the interference effect can be attributed to a functional interaction between the perceptual availability of partial information and the magnitude of response competition. The results also suggest that age does not impair response activation but that advanced age diminishes the availability of local, but not global, feature information.Selective attention functions to facilitate the processing of target information that occurs in the presence of distracting or irrelevant information. This is typically studied with distractor interference tasks, which require participants to select a target in a known location that occurs in the presence ofone or more nontargets (e.g., B. A. Eriksen & C. W Eriksen, 1974). Within these types of tasks, the distractors can slow response times to a target. Currently, there are two main sources of slowing that have been identified-one that functions within early perceptual processes and one that is associated with response selection processes.With regard to early selection, several studies have provided evidence that is consistent with there being a competition among input channels during perceptual processing by demonstrating that responses to a target flanked by visually similar distractors are slower than responses to a target flanked by visually dissimilar distractors (Bjork & Murray, 1977;Estes, 1972 Brown, 1989). To account for this slowing, LaBerge and his colleague (LaBerge, 1995;LaBerge & Brown, 1989) proposed a model in which attention acts as a spatial filter that facilitates target identification (see, also, Coles, Gratton, Bashore, Eriksen, & Donchin, 1985; Luck & Hillyard, 1994;Smid, Mulder, & Mulder, 1990). Within their model, a processing component, called the feature register, functions to extract both feature and location information from each letter presented in a stimulus array. The feature information is sent to a shape identifier that functions to extract the actual identity ofthe letter. In addition, there is a spatial filter that operates under topdown control (i.e., identify the center target letter) to modulate the information flow from the featur...

show abstract

Same-different judgments of foveal and parafoveal letter pairs by older adults

Cited by 39 publications

References 20 publications

Do response time advantage and interference reflect the order of processing of global- and local-level information?

Do response time advantage and interference reflect the order of processing of global- and local-level information?

Sequential and coordinative complexity: Age-based processing limitations in figural transformations.

The functional interaction of visual-perceptual and response mechanisms during selective attention in young adults, young-old adults, and old-old adults

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About