Age related differences in learning with the useful field of view

Abstract

In naturalistic tasks, subjects often interact with a cluttered visual environment in which they need to divide their attention simultaneously among multiple objects and tasks. Previous work examining the effects of aging in tasks that approximate these real world demands have shown that performance often declines with age. For example, when subjects must perform central and peripheral visual tasks simultaneously in a Useful Field of View (UFOV) task, performance on the peripheral task declines relative to when subjects perform the peripheral task alone, and this divided-attention deficit grows decade-by-decade throughout our lifetimes [e.g., Sekuler, A.B., Bennett, P.J., and Mamelak, M. (2000). Effects of Aging on the Useful Field of View. Experimental Aging Research, 26, 103-120]. Here, we investigated the extent to which age-related differences in divided-attention could be overcome with practice. In addition, we assessed how divided attention costs varied when initial performance levels were equated across age groups at the start of practice. Experiment 1 determined the stimulus durations that approximately equated attentional costs for younger and older subjects. These stimulus durations were used in Experiments 2 and 3 to equate task difficulty across age. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the effect of practice for 1-2 weeks. Practice improved performance for both younger and older subjects, and, when older subjects were provided with enough practice, their attentional costs were equivalent to those of younger subjects. Indeed, with enough practice, both younger and older subjects reached a point where they showed no divided-attention deficits, although older subjects may need more practice to reach this point. Finally, the beneficial effects of practice were maintained for at least three months.

Learning Shapes the Representation of Visual Categories in the Aging Human Brain

“…However, our findings show that both young and older adults can flexibly learn new decision criteria (i.e., categorical boundary) that determine the categorical membership of visual forms on the basis of stimulus-response associations. This is consistent with recent studies showing similar performance across age groups for probabilistic learning of categories on the basis of implicit stimulus-outcome associations (Fera et al, 2005;Davis, Klebe, Bever, & Spring, 1998) and with theoretical and psychophysical evidence that older adults can match the performance of younger adults given sufficient practice (Ratcliff, Thapar, & McKoon, 2006;Richards, Bennett, & Sekuler, 2006). Interestingly, age-related differences in perceptual learning have been reported for speech comprehension.…”

Playing shooter and driving videogames improves top-down guidance in visual search

“…Effective training methods to counter the normal age-related deterioration in spatial selective attentional capacities would be extremely valuable. Playing a driving game could help older adults maintain their existing skills, or perhaps even reverse decline, especially in tasks in which divided attentional costs are involved (Bherer, Kramer, & Peterson, 2008;Cassavaugh & Kramer, 2009;Richards, Bennett, & Sekuler, 2006).…”

Can We Predict Steering Control Performance from a 2D Shape Detection Task?

“…Andersen et al (2010) found that training with subthreshold stimuli improved older observers when performing a texture discrimination task. Richards et al (2006) found that older observers could improve their performance in divided attention through repeated training with the UFOV task. Similarly, improvements in contrast sensitivity through training were found for older adults in a recent study (Phan and Ni, 2011).…”