Tsvetanov Kamen A, Mevorach Carmel, Allen Harriet, Humphreys Glyn W
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2013 Oct;75(7):1382-94. doi: 10.3758/s13414-013-0499-9.
We examined the ability of older adults to select local and global stimuli varying in perceptual saliency-a task requiring nonspatial visual selection. Participants were asked to identify in separate blocks a target at either the global or the local level of a hierarchical stimulus, while the saliency of each level was varied (across different conditions, either the local or the global form was the more salient and relatively easier to identify). Older adults were less efficient than young adults in ignoring distractors that were higher in saliency than were targets, and this occurred across both the global and local levels of form. The increased effects of distractor saliency on older adults occurred even when the effects were scaled by overall differences in task performance. The data provide evidence for an age-related decline in nonspatial attentional selection of low-salient hierarchical stimuli, not determined by the (global or local) level at which selection was required. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding both the interaction between saliency and hierarchical processing and the effects of aging on nonspatial visual attention.
我们研究了老年人选择在感知显著性上存在差异的局部和整体刺激的能力——这是一项需要非空间视觉选择的任务。参与者被要求在不同的组块中识别分层刺激的全局或局部水平上的目标，同时每个水平的显著性会有所变化（在不同条件下，局部或全局形式更显著且相对更容易识别）。在忽略比目标显著性更高的干扰物方面，老年人比年轻人效率更低，这种情况在形式的全局和局部水平上都存在。即使干扰物显著性对老年人的影响按任务表现的总体差异进行缩放，这种影响仍然会增加。这些数据为低显著性分层刺激的非空间注意力选择中与年龄相关 的下降提供了证据，这种下降并非由所需选择的（全局或局部）水平决定。我们讨论了这些结果对于理解显著性与分层处理之间的相互作用以及衰老对非空间视觉注意力的影响的意义。
