Attentional and perceptual contributions to the identification of extrafoveal stimuli: adult age comparisons

Article Abstract:

Reaction time to a visual stimulus increases as the distance of the image from the fovea (at the center of the retina) increases. The effect becomes more pronounced as one ages. Age differences are not just due to changes in visual acuity or to changes in attention; experiments that control for these changes show the same age effects. Two experiments were designed to test the attentional and perceptual contributions to the increased reaction time to stimuli outside the central retinal area seen with advancing age. Both experiments used focused and unfocused conditions. In the focused condition, attention was required to be focused on the center character of the target, whereas in the unfocused condition the stimulus was not central. Twenty-four younger adults and 17 older adults were studied, and in both experiments older adults were slower to respond to stimuli and made more errors than younger adults. The difference between focused and unfocused conditions was greater for older adults than for younger adults as well. Allowing sufficient time for processing by older adults essentially eliminated effects due to age differences. Therefore, the differences appear to be due to older adults requiring more time to process stimuli outside the fovea than younger adults. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)

Testing, Demographic aspects, Perception, Perception (Psychology), Peripheral vision, Visual evoked response, Visual evoked potentials

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Life span changes in the verbal categorization of odors

Article Abstract:

The life span changes in the description of six microencapsulated odors were deduced from a survey of 1.19 million respondents aged 10 to 90 years old. Results showed that odor description weakened with advancing age most evident after the 70th year with odor-specific patterns of change. Age-specific multidimensional scaling maps were developed from odor descriptor profiles. Respondents from the sixth to the ninth decades showed major dispplacements for two odors with the sweet dimension of odor quality particularly variable with maturation.

Psychological aspects, Research, Smell, Odors, Cognition in old age, Old age cognition

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