Age differences in visual statistical learning.
- 1 September 2012
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Psychology and Aging
- Vol. 27 (3), 650-656
- https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026780
Abstract
Recent work has shown that older adults' lessened inhibitory control leads them to inadvertently bind co-occurring targets and distractors. Although this hyper-binding effect may lead to the formation of more superfluous associations, and thus greater interference at retrieval for older adults, it may also lead to a greater knowledge of information contained within the periphery of awareness. On the basis of evidence that younger adults only show learning for statistical regularities contained within attended information, we asked whether older adults may also show learning for regularities contained within to-be-ignored information. Older and younger adults viewed a series of red and green pictures and performed a 1-back task on one of the colors. Unbeknownst to participants, both color streams were organized into triplets that occurred sequentially. Implicit memory for the triplets from both the attended and ignored streams was tested using a speeded detection task. Replicating previous work, younger adults demonstrated more learning for the attended triplets than the unattended triplets. Older adults, however, demonstrated similar learning for both the attended and ignored triplets, suggesting that contrary to popular belief, they may actually know more than younger adults about the world around them, including how seemingly irrelevant events co-occur.Keywords
Funding Information
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP89769)
This publication has 23 references indexed in Scilit:
- Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significanceNature Neuroscience, 2011
- Cognition Without ControlCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, 2009
- Aging and a benefit of distractibilityPsychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2007
- The Automaticity of Social LifeCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, 2006
- Structure and strength in causal inductionCognitive Psychology, 2005
- The Automaticity of Visual Statistical Learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2005
- Using confidence intervals for graphically based data interpretation.Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 2003
- Unsupervised Statistical Learning of Higher-Order Spatial Structures from Visual ScenesPsychological Science, 2001
- Age and the availability of inferences.Psychology and Aging, 1992
- Age Deficits in Retrieval: The Fan EffectJournal of Gerontology, 1991