Differential aging of motion processing mechanisms: Evidence against general perceptual decline

Abstract

While the percentage of older people in our society is steadily increasing, knowledge about perceptual changes during healthy aging is still limited. We investigated age effects on visual motion perception in order to differentiate between general decline and specific vulnerabilities. A total of 119 subjects ranging in age from 20 to 82 years participated in our study. Perceptual thresholds for different types of motion information, including translational motion, expanding radial flow, and biological motion, were determined. Results revealed a substantial increase of thresholds for translational motion with age. Biological motion perception was only moderately affected by age. For both motion types, threshold elevation seemed to develop gradually with age. In contrast, we found stable radial flow analysis across lifespan. There was no evidence that age effects were dependent on gender. Results demonstrate that visual capabilities are not equally prone to age-related decline. Surprisingly, higher motion complexity might not be necessarily associated with more pronounced perceptual constraints. We suggest that differential age effects on the perception of specific motion types might indicate that specialized neuronal processing mechanisms differ in their vulnerability to physiological changes during aging.

Psychophysical correlates of global motion processing in the aging visual system: A critical review

“…In agreement with previous studies, they found an age-related deterioration in global motion processing. Billino, Bremmer and Gegenfurtner (2008) also found a deleterious effect of age on translational global motion perception in participants ranging from 20 to 82 years. However, the precise extent of age-related deficits are unresolved with estimates of deterioration between participants in their 20s and 70s ranging from around 2 to 13.5 %.…”

“…The results of other studies suggest that, whilst older women do have significantly higher coherence thresholds (i.e. worse performance), this is also true of younger female participants (Billino et al, 2008), and perhaps is indicative of a general gender difference in global motion perception, rather than one specific to age. Snowden and Kavanagh (2006) also found gender effects on both tasks of motion coherence and speed discrimination, but none of these interacted with age.…”

“…At a dot speed of 22 deg/sec, Atchley and Anderson (1998) found evidence of age-related decreases in performance in both central and peripheral (< 40 deg) vision. Other studies (Trick & Siverman, 1991;Ball & Sekuler, 1987;Wojciechowski et al, 1995;Billino et al 2008) have also provided evidence of age-related global motion deficits when local dot speed was high, namely 6, 10, 28 and 6.6 or 18.6 deg/sec, respectively. These findings suggest that speedtuning changes with age and optimal sensitivity becomes restricted to a much narrower range of speeds in the aging visual system (see Table 1 for a synopsis of main findings).…”

“…Similarly, Wojciechowski et al (1995) found performance on a direction-identification task decreased by 1.1 % per decade. Other estimates include a 0.4 % threshold increase per decade (Tran et al, 1998), and a 2.7 % threshold increase per decade (Billino et al, 2008). The findings of other studies however suggest that the ability to encode global motion is relatively well preserved until around 70 years of age (Bennett, Sekuler & Sekuler, 2007;Arena et al, 2011).…”

“…Although there is evidence that males exhibit better performance than females in tasks that involve cognitive aspects of vision such as visual navigation (e.g. Astur, Ortiz & Sutherland, 1998) and mental rotation (Jansen & Heil, 2010), with the exception of the findings of Billino et al (2008) and Snowden and Kavanagh (2006), there is little evidence that this is generally the case in more low-level visual tasks such as global motion perception. The possible existence of gender-specific deficits in the processing of moving patterns and the role of sex hormones in visual cortex activity is, however, an interesting issue that certainly warrants further study.…”