Age and tachistoscopic perception.

A perception experiment involving tachistoscopic exposures of 10 alphabetic characters was conducted in order to answer the following questions. Do young and old adult subjects exhibit performance differences in tachistoscopic perception which involves the earliest stages of information processing; and, if so, what is the nature of these differences? The answer to the first part of the question was a clear and definite yes. Old adult subjects were found to perform at a significantly lower level than younger adult subjects in nearly all measures of perceptual performance. With respect to the second part of the question, both strategy and capacity differences were found to be responsible for the poorer performance of the older subjects. The older subjects used a suboptimal performance strategy more frequently, and were apparently slower at processing visual information than younger subjects.