Effects of Reduced Contrast on Young and Older Adults' Utilization of Context during Reading

Abstract

People frequently read in sub-optimal conditions (Charness & Dijkstra, 1999). When text is difficult to perceive, readers can rely on sentential context as a compensatory strategy. Specifically, readers can develop expectations about which words will occur in a text based on the context in which words occur. The purpose of this study was to examine age differences in the use of contextual utilization, by comparing words that were highly predictable from their sentence context to words that were less predictable from their sentence context. Text was presented in three different levels of text/background contrast (high, medium, low) to explore the effects of contrast reduction. Eye tracking was used to measure fixation times to target words. Readers, particularly older adults, fixated low-predictability words longer than high-predictability words. Contrast reduction did not significantly influence reading times for either group, suggesting that readers are tolerant of some forms of stimulus quality degradation.

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