@article{ref1,
title="Age-Related Increase in Top-Down Activation of Visual Features",
journal="Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)",
year="2007",
author="Madden, David J. and Spaniol, Julia and Bucur, Barbara and Whiting, Wythe L.",
volume="60",
number="5",
pages="644-651",
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.<p />",
language="",
issn="1747-0218",
doi="10.1080/17470210601154347",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470210601154347"
}