Access and Use of Contextual Expectations in Visual Search during Aging.
Miguel Borges, Moreno I. Coco · 2015
Expectations are routinely utilized by the cognitive system to facilitate processing and optimize responses. However, as we age, the access and use of expectations might undergo significant changes. In an eye-tracking study, we investigate how search performance in young and old age is influenced by contextual priming of expectations, and the contextual consistency of the target object. We demonstrate that older participants congruently primed perform significantly worse, especially when the target object is inconsistent with the scene context (e.g., exposed to a ‘restaurant’ scene before performing the search in another ‘restaurant’ scene, but looking for an ‘iron’ rather than ‘bread’). Even though congruency and consistency differentially impact on the eye-movement responses of the two age groups, they do not display any interaction. Overall, this study suggests that reliance on mechanisms of contextual expectations becomes stronger when we get older.