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EXPRESS: Age-related differences when searching in a real environment: The use of semantic contextual guidance and incidental object encoding.

EXPRESS: Age-related differences when searching in a real environment: The use of semantic contextual guidance and incidental object encoding. Thumbnail


Abstract

Visual search is a crucial, everyday activity that declines with aging. Here, referring to the environmental support account, we hypothesized that semantic contextual associations between the target and the neighboring objects (e.g., a teacup near a tea bag and a spoon), acting as external cues, may counteract this decline. Moreover, when searching for a target, viewers may encode information about the co-present distractor objects, by simply looking at them. In everyday life, where viewers often search for several targets within the same environment, such distractor objects may often become targets of future searches. Thus, we examined whether incidentally fixating a target during previous trials, when it was a distractor, may also modulate the impact of aging on search performance. We used everyday object arrays on tables in a real room, where healthy young and older adults had to search sequentially for multiple objects across different trials within the same array. We showed that search was quicker: (1) in young than older adults, (2) for targets surrounded by semantically associated objects than unassociated objects, but only in older adults, and (3) for incidentally fixated targets than for targets that were not fixated when they were distractors, with no differences between young and older adults. These results suggest that older viewers use both environmental support based on object semantic associations and object information incidentally encoded to enhance efficiency of real-world search, even in relatively simple environments. This reduces, but does not eliminate, search decline related to aging.

Acceptance Date Nov 24, 2021
Publication Date Nov 24, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Print ISSN 1747-0218
Publisher Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218211064887
Keywords Visual search; ageing; real environment; semantic contextual guidance; incidental encoding
Publisher URL https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218211064887

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