Does age change the distribution of visual attention? A comment on McCalley, Bouwhuis, and Juola (1995)

A paper, by McCalley, Bouwhuis, and Juola (1995) suggested differences betw een younger and older adults in the use of visual cues. Furthermore, they r eported these differences could largely be attributed to diminished (periph eral al) visual proressing capacities of elderly adults. I-It re, we reanal yze the data of McCalley and colleagues emphasizing relative rather than ab solute differences. We find that when doing so, the data do not reveal diff erences in the way older and younger adults transiently allocate attention during visual search. Contrary to the conclusions of McCalley and colleague s, the similarity between the younger and older observers is therefore inde pendent of the characteristics of the visual information. Furthermore, in o ur view the data suggest that older adults have foveal rather than peripher al visual processing difficulties. The results reemphasize the importance o f the analytical approach taken in aging research, We discuss the difficult ies and relevance of controlling and separating visual and attentional fact ors in age-related studies.