Aging and Similarity Grouping in Visual Search

Abstract

It has been argued that principles of perceptual organization play an important role in the representation of a visual stimulus and that elderly adults may be deficient in perceptual unit formation. The present study examined the extent to which the Gestalt principles of grouping by proximity and similarity predicted the formation of large perceptual units that could affect performance in a visual search task. The verbal reaction time to determine the presence or absence of a target letter in arrays of 1, 5, or 9 elements was determined for young (20 years) and elderly (69 years) adults. Both age groups could take advantage of the organization implied by Gestalt principles in finding a target in the context of a small implied group. The elderly adults, however, were not able to organize a single perceptual unit composed of eight elements. Thus, although the visual search performance of the age groups was similar, the elderly adults did yield evidence of a perceptual organization deficit.

Visual attention and aging

“…The use of cluttered displays to evaluate object-based selection and aging is important due to the difficulty older adults have evidenced when searching for targets among heterogeneous distractors (69,75). Also, given that there is evidence for both space-based and object-based attentional selection, and the possibility that the two types may interact, aging research should focus on whether age differences could be the result of having to shift from one form of selection to another within any given task.…”

Symbol–digit substitution and individual differences in visual search ability

“…The literature on visual search processes has demonstrated clearly that the search for a target is more difficult if the array contains confusable nontargets (e.g., Gilmore, Tobias, & Royer, 1985;Krumhansl & Thomas, 1977;McIntyre, Fox, & Neale, 1970). The present study investigated the visual search process by manipulating the number of confusable elements in a symbol array.…”

Similar behaviour, different brain patterns: Age-related changes in neural signatures of ignoring

“…There are several reasons to suspect that older adults might be impaired at preview search compared to younger adults. First, there is an age-related decline in the ability to segment the image by spatial cues (Gilmore et al, 1985;Madden et al, 1996) and it is likely that there are shared processes underlying segmentation by time and segmentation by other cues (e.g. Dent et al, 2011).…”