Abstract
Did I miss that sign post? - Where did I leave my glasses? Older adults increasingly report experiencing such cognitive failures. Consistent with this experience, age-related decline has been demonstrated in standard visual search experiments. These standard laboratory tasks typically use simple stimulus material and brief trial structures that are well-designed to isolate some specific cognitive process component. Real-world tasks, however, while built of these smaller components, are complex and extend over longer periods of time. In this talk, I will compare findings on age differences in simple visual search experiments to our recent findings from extended hybrid (visual and memory) search and foraging tasks. The extended search tasks resemble complex real-world tasks more closely and enable us to look at age differences in attention, memory, and strategic process components within one single task. Surprisingly, after generalized age-related slowing of reaction times (RT) was controlled for, the extended search tasks did not reveal any age-specific deficits in attention and memory functions. However, we did find age-related decline in search efficiency, which were explained by differences between age groups in foraging strategies. I will discuss how these new results challenge current theories on cognitive aging and what impact they could have on the neuropsychological assessment of age-related cognitive changes.