EFFECTS OF STIMULUS INTEGRALITY ON VISUAL-ATTENTION IN OLDER AND YOUNGER ADULTS - A QUANTITATIVE MODEL-BASED ANALYSIS

Twenty-one older and 21 younger adults were administered a series of v isual attention tasks. A series of quantitative models was applied to each observer's data to determine whether he or she performed optimall y or suboptimally or showed a deficit-in-attentional processing. The r esults suggested that (a) older and younger observers were affected eq ually by the integrality-separability manipulation, (b) there are no a ge-related differences in selective attention performance for either i ntegral or separable-dimension stimuli, (c) there are no age-related d ifferences in dimensional integration performance with separable-dimen sion stimuli, and (d) older observers were more likely to be suboptima l when asked to integrate information from integral-dimension stimuli. Implications for current theories of attentional processing in normal aging are discussed.