SALIENT NATURAL SCENE ATTRACTS BOTH YOUNGER AND OLDER ADULTS’ ATTENTION

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine whether salient natural scenes attract both younger and older adults’ attention in a visual search task. We manipulated the search set size and the perceptual saliency of the target scene (singleton vs. nonsingleton). In the singleton condition, a target image was always presented in color, and distractors were presented in grayscale. In the nonsingleton condition, both target and distractor images were presented in color. Younger and older adults were asked to detect the target in scenes and to categorize it as an animal or vehicle. The results showed that, although older adults’ decisions were slower than those of younger adults, older adults could still perform visual search efficiently in the singleton condition as compared with the nonsingleton condition. These results suggest that salient natural scenes attract both younger and older adults’ attention in scene perception based on the relatively bottom-up attentional processing.