Age similarities in the inertial properties of attention

Adult age differences in the mode of allocation of visual attention were in vestigated, using a visual search task with a circular display containing o ne target letter and seven distracter letters. In two experiments, a total of 56 younger adults (M = 20 years) and 56 older adults (M = 66 years) sear ched for a target appearing with equal probability at one of two cued locat ions. The first cue appeared 115 msec before display onset, and the second cue appeared with display onset; distance between the two cued locations wa s varied. Target identification performance indicated that attention was in ertial, in that reaction time for second-cued targets was related either to the area of the portion of the visual field containing possible target loc ations or to the mean path length of a serial self-terminating search. Ther e were no age-related decrements in the allocation of visual attention.