Age doesn’t matter much: hybrid visual and memory search is preserved in older adults

Iris Wiegand,Jeremy M Wolfe

doi:10.1080/13825585.2019.1604941

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe tested younger and older observers’ attention and long-term memory functions in a “hybrid search” task, in which observers look through visual displays for instances of any of several types of targets held in memory. Apart from a general slowing, search efficiency did not change with age. In both age groups, reaction times increased linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the memory set size, with similar relative costs of increasing load (Experiment 1). We replicated the finding and further showed that performance remained comparable between age groups when familiarity cues were made irrelevant (Experiment 2) and target-context associations were to be retrieved (Experiment 3). Our findings are at variance with theories of cognitive aging that propose age-specific deficits in attention and memory. As hybrid search resembles many real-world searches, our results might be relevant to improve the ecological validity of assessing age-related cognitive decline.

Highlights

Decline in attention and episodic long-term memory (LTM) are considered two hallmarks of cognitive aging (Craik & Salthouse, 2011; Hoyer & Verhaeghen, 2006; Wang, Daselaar, & Cabeza, 2017)
We examined whether the linear reaction times (RT) × visual set size function and logarithmic RT × memory set size functions shown in younger adults (YA) many times could be replicated in older adults (OA)
We replicated the pattern of linear RT × visual set size and logarithmic RT × memory set size functions in a sample of OA

Summary

Introduction

Decline in attention and episodic long-term memory (LTM) are considered two hallmarks of cognitive aging (Craik & Salthouse, 2011; Hoyer & Verhaeghen, 2006; Wang, Daselaar, & Cabeza, 2017). In typical visual search tasks, an observer looks for a specific target item among several non-target items in a display (Wolfe, 1994). It has been shown that older adults produce steeper search slopes than younger adults under conditions where visual selection is hard because targets are difficult to distinguish from the surrounding non-target distractors (Madden & Whiting, 2004). Though overall RT are somewhat slower, older adults show flat search slopes, just as younger adults (Plude & Doussard-Roosevelt, 1989; Whiting, Madden, Pierce, & Allen, 2005).

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Results

Conclusion