Abstract
Global precedence has been found to decline or even shift to local precedence with increasing age. Little is known about the consequence of this age-related decline of global precedence on other aspects of older adults’ vision. The global and local processing has been preferentially associated with the low-spatial-frequency (LSF) and high-spatial-frequency (HSF) channels, respectively. Here, we used low- and high-pass filtered faces together with the Ebbinghaus illusion whose magnitude is an index of context sensitivity. The results demonstrated that, relative to HSF faces, prior exposure to LSF faces increased the illusion magnitude for younger participants, but it reduced the illusion magnitude for older participants. Significant age group difference was observed only with prior exposure to LSF faces but not to HSF faces. Moreover, similar patterns of results were observed when the filtered faces were rendered invisible with backward masking, and the magnitude of age-related decline was comparable to the visible condition. Our study reveals that LSF-related enhancement of context sensitivity declines with advancing age, and this age-related decline was independent of the awareness of the spatial frequency information. Our findings support the right hemi-aging model and suggest that the magnocellular projections from subcortical to cortical regions might also be vulnerable to age-related changes.
Highlights
Aging is associated with a decline in many aspects of visual processing, including global and local processing1, which may affect the everyday functioning and well-being of older adults
The results showed that, for the younger participants, prior exposure to LSF faces increased the illusion strength relative to prior exposure to HSF ones
Numerous studies support the right hemisphere hypothesis of cognitive aging, which claims that cognitive functions which correlate with the right hemisphere decline faster than those confined to the left hemisphere (Brown and Jaffe, 1975; Dolcos et al, 2002)
Summary
Aging is associated with a decline in many aspects of visual processing, including global and local processing, which may affect the everyday functioning and well-being of older adults. Mundy (2014) found that when younger adults were prior exposed to global or local forms of Navon stimuli, the magnitude of the Müller-Lyer illusion which was measured subsequently was significantly increased for participants with a global processing bias and was significantly reduced for those with a local processing bias, in contrast to a control condition. Chen et al (2018) found that when younger participants were prior exposed to LSF information, the magnitude of the Ebbinghaus illusion which was measured subsequently was significantly increased relative to prior exposure to HSF information. For the younger participants, prior exposure to LSF faces would increase the illusion strength relative to HSF faces This LSF-related enhancement of context sensitivity would decline or even reverse for the older participants
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