The authors examined age-related differences in target discrimination before the saccade to investigate the influence of aging on the facilitation of target discrimination by shifts of attention. Older and younger adults made saccades toward a peripheral stimulus after its onset and discriminated the orientation of the stimulus. Mean saccadic latency was greater for older adults than for younger adults. Facilitation of target discrimination immediately before the saccades was found both in older and younger adults. These results suggest that aging affects the properties of saccades but does not affect the properties of attentional shifts immediately before a saccade.

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Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of feature similarity and discrimination category in a flanker task. Gabor patches were used as target and distractor stimuli for each experiment. In the first experiment, the target turned to minus or plus 45 deg from the vertical, whereas the orientation of the distractors changed between minus and plus 45 deg by 15 deg. For the second experiment, three conditions of the target orientation were used: minus or plus 45 deg, minus 22.5 deg or plus 67.5 deg, and 0 deg or plus 90 deg. The orientation of the distractors changed between the orientations of the two targets by 22.5 deg. In the third experiment, the target turned to minus or plus 10 deg from the vertical, whereas the orientation of the distractors changed between minus and plus 40 deg by 5 deg. The results showed that responses to the target were affected by the difference between the orientations of the target and the distractors as well as the category of their orientations.