Gilmore G C, Tobias T R, Royer F L
J Gerontol. 1985 Sep;40(5):586-92. doi: 10.1093/geronj/40.5.586.
It has been argued that principles of perceptual organization play an important role in the representation of a visual stimulus and that elderly adults may be deficient in perceptual unit formation. The present study examined the extent to which the Gestalt principles of grouping by proximity and similarity predicted the formation of large perceptual units that could affect performance in a visual search task. The verbal reaction time to determine the presence or absence of a target letter in arrays of 1, 5, or 9 elements was determined for young (20 years) and elderly (69 years) adults. Both age groups could take advantage of the organization implied by Gestalt principles in finding a target in the context of a small implied group. The elderly adults, however, were not able to organize a single perceptual unit composed of eight elements. Thus, although the visual search performance of the age groups was similar, the elderly adults did yield evidence of a perceptual organization deficit.
有人认为，知觉组织原则在视觉刺激的表征中起着重要作用，并且老年人在知觉单元形成方面可能存在缺陷。本研究考察了接近性和相似性分组的格式塔原则在多大程度上预测了可能影响视觉搜索任务表现的大型知觉单元的形成。测定了年轻（20岁）和年长（69岁）成年人在1、5或9个元素阵列中确定目标字母是否存在时的言语反应时间。两个年龄组在小隐含组的背景下寻找目标时都能利用格式塔原则所隐含的组织。然而，年长成年人无法组织由八个元素组成的单个知觉单元。因此，尽管两个年龄组的视觉搜索表现相似，但年长成年人确实表现出了知觉组织缺陷的证据。
