Adult age differences in visual search accuracy: Attentional guidance and target detectability

Previous research, relying primarily on reaction time measures of highly ac curate performance, suggests that both younger and older adults can increas e the efficiency of visual search by guiding attention to a candidate subse t of items. The authors investigated attentional guidance when accuracy was well below ceiling to focus more specifically on the role of perceptual pr ocesses. In the most difficult condition (conjunction search), the likeliho od of missing a target was greater for older adults than for younger adults , and this effect was not attributable entirely to generalized slowing. Bot h age groups were able to improve search efficiency by attending to a disti nct subset of display items, indicating that attentional guidance to percep tual features does not exhibit age-related decline, A signal-detection mode l of the conjunction search data demonstrated that the age difference repre sented an age-related decline in target detectability.