Rémy F, Saint-Aubert L, Bacon-Macé N, Vayssière N, Barbeau E, Fabre-Thorpe M
Université de Toulouse, UPS, Centre de recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Toulouse, France; CNRS, CerCo, Toulouse, France.
Vision Res. 2013 Oct 18;91:36-44. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2013.07.006. Epub 2013 Jul 25.
Efficient processing of our complex visual environment is essential and many daily visual tasks rely on accurate and fast object recognition. It is therefore important to evaluate how object recognition performance evolves during the course of adulthood. Surprisingly, this ability has not yet been investigated in the aged population, although several neuroimaging studies have reported altered activity in high-level visual ventral regions when elderly subjects process natural stimuli. In the present study, color photographs of various objects embedded in contextual scenes were used to assess object categorization performance in 97 participants aged from 20 to 91. Objects were either animals or pieces of furniture, embedded in either congruent or incongruent contexts. In every age group, subjects showed reduced categorization performance, both in terms of accuracy and speed, when objects were seen in incongruent vs. congruent contexts. In subjects over 60 years old, object categorization was greatly slowed down when compared to young and middle-aged subjects. Moreover, subjects over 75 years old evidenced a significant decrease in categorization accuracy when objects were seen in incongruent contexts. This indicates that incongruence of the scene may be particularly disturbing in late adulthood, therefore impairing object recognition. Our results suggest that daily visual processing of complex natural environments may be less efficient with age, which might impact performance in everyday visual tasks.
高效处理我们复杂的视觉环境至关重要，许多日常视觉任务都依赖于准确快速的物体识别。因此，评估物体识别能力在成年期如何发展很重要。令人惊讶的是，尽管有几项神经影像学研究报告称，老年受试者处理自然刺激时，高级视觉腹侧区域的活动会发生改变，但尚未对老年人群体的这种能力进行研究。在本研究中，使用嵌入情境场景中的各种物体的彩色照片，评估了97名年龄在20岁至91岁之间的参与者的物体分类表现。物体要么是动物，要么是家具，嵌入在一致或不一致的情境中。在每个年龄组中，当物体处于不一致情境而非一致情境中时，受试者在准确性和速度方面的分类表现都会降低。与年轻和中年受试者相比，60岁以上的受试者物体分类速度大幅减慢。此外，75岁以上的受试者在物体处于不一致情境中时，分类准确性显著下降。这表明场景的不一致在成年后期可能特别令人困扰，从而损害物体识别。我们的结果表明，随着年龄增长，对复杂自然环境的日常视觉处理可能效率较低，这可能会影响日常视觉任务的表现。
