Citation

Madden DJ, Spaniol J, Bucur B, Whiting WL. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. (2006) 2007; 60(5): 644-651.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, SAGE Publications)

DOI

10.1080/17470210601154347

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Previous research suggests that, during visual search and discrimination tasks, older adults place greater emphasis than younger adults on top-down attention. This experiment investigated the relative contribution of target activation and distractor inhibition to this age difference. Younger and older adults performed a singleton discrimination task in which either an E or an R target (colour singleton) was present among distractor letters. Relative to a baseline condition in which the colours of the targets and distractors remained constant, an age-related slowing of performance was evident when either the colour of the target or that of the distractors varied across trials. The age-related slowing was more pronounced in response to target colour variation, suggesting that older adults place relatively greater emphasis on the top-down activation of target features.