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

Hutchinson, Claire V.; Arena, Amanda; Allen, Harriet A.; Ledgeway, Timothy

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.02.009

Cited by 44 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Older adults are known to have deficits in visual motion processing, although recent evidence suggests these age-related deficits may be specific to certain stimulus conditions, with some conditions even revealing enhanced global motion perception in older relative to younger adults (see Hutchinson et al, 2012 for a critical review). In this study, we did find visual motion discrimination thresholds, in the absence of WM, to be significantly worse (by a magnitude of 37%) in older relative to younger adults.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interestingly, only certain aspects of global visual motion perception are affected by aging. Motion perception studies in aging using random dot kinematogram (RDK) stimuli show age-related deficits in motion perception specific to very slow dot motion speeds, high spatial dot displacements and low dot contrasts, but not otherwise (reviewed in Hutchinson et al, 2012). Given such differences in motion perception in aging, it is best practice that a study assessing the impact of motion as interference on WM first equates the perception of the motion stimuli across individuals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comparable mechanisms of working memory interference by auditory and visual motion in youth and aging

et al. 2013

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Intrasensory interference during visual working memory (WM) maintenance by object stimuli (such as faces and scenes), has been shown to negatively impact WM performance, with greater detrimental impacts of interference observed in aging. Here we assessed age-related impacts by intrasensory WM interference from lower-level stimulus features such as visual and auditory motion stimuli. We consistently found that interference in the form of ignored distractions and secondary task i nterruptions presented during a WM maintenance period, degraded memory accuracy in both the visual and auditory domain. However, in contrast to prior studies assessing WM for visual object stimuli, feature-based interference effects were not observed to be significantly greater in older adults. Analyses of neural oscillations in the alpha frequency band further revealed preserved mechanisms of interference processing in terms of post-stimulus alpha suppression, which was observed maximally for secondary task interruptions in visual and auditory modalities in both younger and older adults. These results suggest that age-related sensitivity of WM to interference may be limited to complex object stimuli, at least at low WM loads.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparable mechanisms of working memory interference by auditory and visual motion in youth and aging

et al. 2013

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“…The relative effects of other factors such as aperture area (overall stimulus size) and dot number/density on age-related global motion deficits are presently unclear, despite these being strong influences on performance in younger adults (see Hutchinson et al, 2012). As the size of a stimulus increases, detection and discrimination thresholds typically decrease (e.g., Lappin and Bell, 1976; Anderson and Burr, 1991; Watson and Turano, 1995; Hutchinson and Ledgeway, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ups and downs of global motion perception: a paradoxical advantage for smaller stimuli in the aging visual system

Hutchinson¹,

Ledgeway²,

Allen³

2014

Front. Aging Neurosci.

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Recent evidence suggests that normal aging is typically accompanied by impairment in the ability to perceive the global (overall) motion of visual objects in the world. The purpose of this study was to examine the interplay between age-related changes in the ability to perceive translational global motion (up vs. down) and important factors such as the spatial extent (size) over which movement occurs and how cluttered the moving elements are (density). We used random dot kinematograms (RDKs) and measured motion coherence thresholds (% signal elements required to reliably discriminate global direction) for young and older adults. We did so as a function of the number and density of local signal elements, and the aperture area in which they were displayed. We found that older adults’ performance was relatively unaffected by changes in aperture size, the number and density of local elements in the display. In young adults, performance was also insensitive to element number and density but was modulated markedly by display size, such that motion coherence thresholds decreased as aperture area increased (participants required fewer local elements to move coherently to determine the overall image direction). With the smallest apertures tested, young participants’ motion coherence thresholds were considerably higher (~1.5 times worse) than those of their older counterparts. Therefore, when RDK size is relatively small, older participants were actually better than young participants at processing global motion. These findings suggest that the normal (disease-free) aging process does not lead to a general decline in perceptual ability and in some cases may be visually advantageous. The results have important implications for the understanding of the consequences of aging on visual function and a number of potential explanations are explored. These include age-related changes in spatial summation, reduced cortical inhibition, neural blur and attentional resource allocation.

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“…A recent review by Hutchinson et al (2012) concludes that aging impairs global motion processing only under some conditions: when the visual field is very large, at low and high (but not medium) velocities and at low contrast. There are at least two reasons that could suggest that age-related sensitivity loss to global motion processing may not reflect a deficit to high-level global motion processing per se .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature tracking and aging

Allard¹,

Lagacé-Nadon²,

Faubert³

2013

Front. Psychol.

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There are conflicting results regarding the effect of aging on second-order motion processing (i.e., motion defined by attributes other than luminance, such as contrast). Two studies (Habak and Faubert, 2000; Tang and Zhou, 2009) found that second-order motion processing was more vulnerable to aging than first-order motion processing. Conversely, Billino et al. (2011) recently found that aging affected first- and second-order motion processing by similar proportions. These three studies used contrast-defined motion as a second-order stimulus, but there can be at least two potential issues when using such a stimulus to evaluate age-related sensitivity losses. First, it has been shown that the motion system processing contrast-defined motion varies depending on the stimulus parameters. Thus, although all these three studies assumed that their contrast-defined motion was processed by a low-level second-order motion system, this was not necessarily the case. The second potential issue is that contrast-defined motion consists in a contrast modulation of a texture rich in high spatial frequencies and aging mainly affects contrast sensitivity at high spatial frequencies. Consequently, some age-related sensitivity loss to second-order motion could be due to a lower sensitivity to the texture rather than to motion processing per se. To avoid these two potential issues, we used a second-order motion stimulus void of high spatial frequencies and which has been shown to be processed by a high-level feature tracking motion system, namely fractal rotation (Lagacé-Nadon et al., 2009). We found an age-related deficit on second-order motion processing at all temporal frequencies including the ones for which no age-related effect on first-order motion processing was observed. We conclude that aging affects the ability to track features. Previous age-related results on second-order and global motion processing are discussed in light of these findings.

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

Cited by 44 publications

References 53 publications

Comparable mechanisms of working memory interference by auditory and visual motion in youth and aging

Comparable mechanisms of working memory interference by auditory and visual motion in youth and aging

The ups and downs of global motion perception: a paradoxical advantage for smaller stimuli in the aging visual system

Feature tracking and aging

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