Aging and the Efficiency of Stimulus-Driven and Goal-Directed Visual Selection

Abstract

The present paper addresses the efficiency with which stimulus-driven attentional capture can interfere with target detection by older and younger observers. The attentional capture paradigm places the stimulus-driven visual selection of perceptually salient objects in opposition to the goal-directed visual selection of objects that possess a target feature. Eighteen older adults and 17 younger adults completed a perceptual feature search experiment that utilized the attentional capture paradigm. Participants searched for a target color in an eight-item display that contained six identical distractors and one singleton distractor. No evidence for age-related differences in the ability to ignore the perceptually salient, but irrelevant singleton distractor were observed.

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