Warrington Kayleigh L, McGowan Victoria A, Paterson Kevin B, White Sarah J
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2018 Nov;44(11):1714-1729. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000543. Epub 2018 Apr 19.
Reductions in stimulus quality may disrupt the reading performance of older adults more when compared with young adults because of sensory declines that begin early in middle age. However, few studies have investigated adult age differences in the effects of stimulus quality on reading, and none have examined how this affects lexical processing and eye movement control. Accordingly, we report two experiments that examine the effects of reduced stimulus quality on the eye movements of young (18-24 years), middle-aged (41-51 years), and older (65+ years) adult readers. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences that contained a high- or low-frequency critical word and that were presented normally or with contrast reduced so that words appeared faint. Experiment 2 further investigated effects of reduced stimulus quality using a gaze-contingent technique to present upcoming text normally or with contrast reduced. Typical patterns of age-related reading difficulty (e.g., slower reading, more regressions) were observed in both experiments. In addition, eye movements were disrupted more for older than younger adults when all text (Experiment 1) or just upcoming text (Experiment 2) appeared faint. Moreover, there was an interaction between stimulus quality and word frequency (Experiment 1), such that readers fixated faint low-frequency words for disproportionately longer. Crucially, this effect was similar across all age groups. Thus, although older readers suffer more from reduced stimulus quality, this additional difficulty primarily affects their visual processing of text. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of stimulus quality on reading behavior across the lifespan. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
由于中年早期就开始出现的感官衰退，与年轻人相比，刺激质量的下降可能会更严重地干扰老年人的阅读表现。然而，很少有研究调查刺激质量对阅读影响方面的成年人年龄差异，也没有研究考察这是如何影响词汇加工和眼动控制的。因此，我们报告了两项实验，研究刺激质量下降对年轻（18 - 24岁）、中年（41 - 51岁）和老年（65岁及以上）成年读者眼动的影响。在实验1中，参与者阅读包含高频或低频关键单词的句子，这些句子以正常方式呈现或对比度降低，使单词显得模糊。实验2使用注视关联技术进一步研究刺激质量下降的影响，该技术以正常方式或对比度降低的方式呈现即将出现的文本。在两项实验中都观察到了与年龄相关的典型阅读困难模式（例如，阅读速度较慢、更多回视）。此外，当所有文本（实验1）或仅即将出现的文本（实验2）显得模糊时，老年人的眼动比年轻人受到的干扰更大。而且，刺激质量和单词频率之间存在交互作用（实验1），即读者注视模糊低频单词的时间比例过长。至关重要的是，这种效应在所有年龄组中都相似。因此，尽管老年读者受刺激质量下降的影响更大，但这种额外的困难主要影响他们对文本的视觉加工。这些发现对于理解刺激质量在整个生命周期阅读行为中的作用具有重要意义。（PsycINFO数据库记录（c）2018美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
