Young and Older Adults' Reading of Distracters

Abstract

We used eye-tracking technology to examine young and older adults' performance in the reading with distraction paradigm. One-, 2- and 4-word distracters that formed meaningful phrases were used. There were marked age differences in fixation patterns. Young adults' fixations to the distracters and targets increased with distracter length, suggesting that they were attempting to integrate the distracters with the sentence and had more and more difficulty doing so as the distracters increased in length. Young adults did have better comprehension of the sentences than older adults and also better recognition memory for target words and distracters.

Susceptibility to Distraction During Reading in Young, Young-Old, and Old-Old Adults

“…This age-related increase in distraction when distractors are semantically related to target text replicates those obtained in previous reading distraction studies (Duchek et al, 1998;Dywan & Murphy, 1996;Mund, Bell, & Buchner, 2010). Susceptibility to distraction when distractors and target stimuli share characteristics has also been observed using different methodologies: picture-word interference (Taylor & Burke, 2002); story-word interference (Bell, Buchner, & Mund, 2008); and sentence-phrase interference (Kemper, McDowd, Metcalf, & Liu, 2008). As a group, these studies suggest that distraction does increase with age in late adulthood, particularly when distractors and target stimuli share characteristics.…”

Hyphens for disambiguating phrases: effectiveness for young and older adults

“…Indeed, we have some indication that distraction may contribute to older adults' performance on our task, in their poorer performance on the hyphenated nonambiguous phrases. In an eye-tracking study, Kemper et al (2008) demonstrated that older readers spent as much processing capacity on both target and distractor words as the younger readers. The authors argued that the younger adults spent their resources on reading and trying to understand the distractor words, whereas the older participants spent their resources reading the sentences as ''word lists'' and did not attempt to fully understand the sentences.…”

“…This framework suggests that nearly all agerelated variance on almost any kind of cognitive task can be accounted for by knowledge of the rate at which a person makes speeded comparisons on perceptual tasks. With respect to processing speed at the sentence level, slower reading times of older adults appear to indicate that they spend more time integrating material which resulted in interpreting sentences differently (Kemper, McDowd, Metcalf, & Liu, 2008). Moreover, reading under time constraints appeared to diminish older adults' reading comprehension accuracy relative to younger adults (Norman, Kemper, & Kynette, 1992).…”

Efecto de la tipografía y presentación de párrafos de textos impresos sobre el aprendizaje a distancia en personas adultas

“…al. 2006, Burgund 2008, Kemper y McDowd 2006, Kemper et al 2008, es posible que nuestros resultados no se extiendan a los niños, y para saberlo es necesario un estudio experimental que mida el aprendizaje de un tema en niños usando diferentes opciones tipográficas que enfaticen elementos distractores como letra negrita o cursiva y serifado de letras. ¿Pudo haber un efecto de desinterés de los estudiantes, que hiciera que no se esforzaran en estudiar porque se trataba de un experimento?…”

“…2006, Burgund 2008. Los adultos de mayor edad tienen además una mejor capacidad de ignorar información distractora dentro del texto, trátese de palabras sueltas o frases completas (Kemper y McDowd 2006, Kemper et al 2008). …”