Age and the discrimination of visual successiveness.

Using a visual successiveness paradigm, young and old adult subjects were compared as to their ability to judge the order of offset of briefly-presented visual stimuli. Consistent with the stimulus-persistence hypothesis and a possible age-related increase in the period of a central perceptual scanning mechanism, old subjects required significantly greater levels of stimulus asynchrony to discriminate order of offset. More generally, these data indicate an age-related loss in the mechanisms which process visual "transients".